In Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, The Lovers, Jutta Carroll and her lover Lukas Grimm are found shot to death in their home. Was it a murder-suicide? Was it the work of their political enemies, or possibly someone close to them? From WWII , the fall of the Berlin Wall, and reunification, The Martyrs, The Lovers is a novel wrought with the best of mystery, historical, and metafiction. Gammon, wielding prose like a surgical scalpel, peels back the layers of history to explore the forces and motivations—external and psychological—that drive politics, passion, and activism, as well as the counterforces that threaten their progress. By probing the all of the possible motives behind Jutta and Lukas’s deaths, Gammons tells a tale of individual roles in world politics, considers the role of Western narrative structures, how and why we tell the stories that endure, and the (im)possibility of Truth. Loosely based on the life and death of the activist and founder of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly, and her partner Gerd Bastien, The Martyrs, The Lovers calls attention to the perennial challenges that informed the lives and deaths of these activists; to environment, to peace, to justice, and to feminism, which, if anything, are more prevalent than ever today.
