The Fortress: A Love Story

by Danielle Trussoni Narrated by Danielle Trussoni

Overview

The critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Falling Through the Earth and Angelology returns with this much-anticipated memoir of love and transformation in the South of France. The Fortress is A Year in Provence meets Eat, Pray, Love by way of The Shining, a riveting account of one woman's journey to the other side of the romantic fairy tale.

“If I had been another woman, I might have been skeptical. But I wasn't another woman. I was a woman ready to be swept away. I was a woman ready for her story to begin. As a writer, story was all that mattered. Rising action, dramatic complication, heroes and villains and dark plots. I believed I was the author of my life, that I controlled the narration.”

From their first meeting, writer Danielle Trussoni is spellbound by a brilliant, mysterious novelist from Bulgaria. The two share a love of music and books and travel, passions that intensify their whirlwind romance. Within months, they are married and embark upon an adventurous life together.

Eight years later, their marriage in trouble, Trussoni* and her husband move to the South of France, hoping to save their relationship. They discover Aubais (pronounced obey, as in love, honor and . . . Aubais), a picturesque medieval village in the Languedoc, where they buy a thirteenth-century stone fortress. Aubais is a Mediterranean paradise of sun, sea, and vineyards, but they soon learn the fortress's secret history of subterranean chambers, Knights Templar, hidden treasure, Nazis, and ghosts. During her years in Aubais, Trussoni's marriage unravels with terrifying consequences, and she comes to understand that love is never the way we imagine it to be.

Trussoni's time in France brings hard-won wisdom about authenticity, commitment, and family. Through her search for true happiness, Danielle Trussoni finds the strength to overcome her illusions and start again.

Unflinching and bold, The Fortress is one woman's struggle to understand the complexities of her own heart. Trussoni's long-awaited return to memoir is a tour de force that changes the conversation about desire and freedom.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

07/18/2016
At one point in this memoir, Trussoni (Falling Through the Earth) finds herself pregnant and on extended bed rest in a hospital in Bulgaria, speaking no Bulgarian. Filled with incidents like this, Trussoni’s is a memoirist’s dream life, ripe for storytelling, and she’s an expert at it. As the story begins, she is a single mother dating a Bulgarian author on a visa visit to the U.S. He is sensitive, brilliant, and appealingly eccentric; he is also duplicitous, but she doesn’t like thinking about that. His visa expires and he sells her on the romance of a quick trip to Bulgaria to get it renewed; the visa requires, he fails to mention, that he stay in Bulgaria for two years. Startled, but still game, she marries him and has a daughter. More deceptions follow, and in an unconventional bid to save her failing marriage, she moves the family to a medieval fortress in a French village. Her husband becomes unbalanced, installing locks on the interior doors of their house and carving Tibetan symbols for death on his office door, yet he accuses her of suffering from mental illness. His gall draws her into a gutter fight to extract herself and her children. It’s a powerful story, and she has the fortitude and the judgment to do it justice. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

A brave and wrenching memoir, Danielle Trussoni’s The Fortress will captivate the many readers who are already in love with her magical novels [...] I dare you to put this book down once you read the opening page. Make that a double dare.” — Julie Metz, author of Perfection

“The Fortress is a bold book about the most intimate things. Danielle Trussoni’s clear-eyed examination of how she loved and lost her husband is both a page-turner and a profound meditation on the nature of desire and freedom in the modern age.” — Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild.

“A memoir that reads like a fairy tale….entertaining.” — Kirkus Reviews

“[The Fortress] is a powerful story, and Trussoni has the fortitude and judgment to do it justice.” — Publishers Weekly

With vivid eloquence and wrenching honesty, The Fortress lays bare one of the great mysteries of modern life: the secret emotional world of a failing marriage. — Lev Grossman, bestselling author of The Magicians

Cheryl Strayed

The Fortress is a bold book about the most intimate things. Danielle Trussoni’s clear-eyed examination of how she loved and lost her husband is both a page-turner and a profound meditation on the nature of desire and freedom in the modern age.

Lev Grossman

With vivid eloquence and wrenching honesty, The Fortress lays bare one of the great mysteries of modern life: the secret emotional world of a failing marriage.

Julie Metz

A brave and wrenching memoir, Danielle Trussoni’s The Fortress will captivate the many readers who are already in love with her magical novels [...] I dare you to put this book down once you read the opening page. Make that a double dare.

Library Journal

04/01/2016
After two New York Times best-selling novels, the unearthly Angelology and Angelopolis, Trussoni returns to memoir territory, which she first trod in Falling Through the Earth, a 2006 New York Times Best Book. Here she explains how she met and quickly fell for Bulgarian American novelist Nikolai Grozni (Wunderkind). Eight years later, they repaired to a 13th-century fortress built by the Knights Templar in the Languedoc, France, with the hopes of healing their marriage. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Kirkus Reviews

2016-06-22
A handsome prince turns into an ogre in a memoir that reads like a fairy tale.When she was 27, novelist and memoirist Trussoni (Angelopolis, 2013, etc.), married with a 1-year-old son, met Nikolai, a mesmerizing Bulgarian "with an aura of invincibility about him." As she confesses, "I was a woman ready to be swept away." Nikolai, she told her dismayed husband, was "a magician who would make all my dreams come true." At first blinded by his exoticism, Trussoni gradually realized that Nikolai was no hero, although he was so mired in superstition (evil eyes, mantras, and hexes) that he fit the description of a magician. Their marriage began to fall apart, and after 8 years and the failure of couples therapy, the author decided they must move "far away from everything—far from successes and troubles," to a village in the south of France, where, she hoped, they could protect their "fragile love." Installed in a medieval fortress, Nikolai became increasingly moody, withdrawn, and erratic. A friend, who plied him with herbal remedies, suggested a weekend getaway. When that turned sour, Trussoni decided to stage an elaborate renewal ceremony, but Nikolai had a near-breakdown during the ritual. The author devotes much of the narrative to reconstructing Nikolai's long rants, but she offers little insight about her own insecurities and delusions. She consulted an astrologer, who told her that her soul yearned for "authentic love," which would require "growing through hell." Enter a gorgeous young Frenchman, with whom Trussoni began an affair, inciting Nikolai to desperate measures. The author is an engaging storyteller, but her memoir is weakened by clichés (a resident ghost, the princess locked in the castle) and stock characters, including a fairy godmother (her lover's chic mother) who rescued her. Back in the United States, Trussoni eventually came to the trite conclusion that she could not sustain a relationship until she learned how "to be a singular person" who could be "happy alone first." An entertaining but too predictable tale.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173805737
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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