A Stone for Bread

In 1963, North Carolina poet Henry Beam published a collection of poems, claiming they had been saved from a Nazi death camp. The controversy over authorship that followed cost Henry his teaching position and forced his into decades of silence. Thirty-four years after the book’s publication, Henry begins telling grad student Rachel Singer about his year in Paris. The novel moves from 1997 North Carolina to post WWI France , to Paris in the mid-50’s and into the horror of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. While Rachel wonders how much is true, Henry’s story forces her to examine her own life and the secret she has never acknowledged.