'In 1806 Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Prussia. Beginning on the very day he leads his triumphant Grande Armee into Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate. Fortune traces the fates of a handful of souls whose lives briefly touch on that momentous day and then diverge across the globe.
'Spanning more than a century, the novel moves from the Napoleonic Wars to South America, and from the early penal settlement of Van Diemen's Land to the cannons of the First World War, mapping the reverberations of history on ordinary people. Some lives are willed into action and others are merely endured, but all are subject to the unpredictable whims of chance. Fortune is a historical novel like no other, a perfect jewel of epic and intense brilliance.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
A brief review of this work appeared in The New York Times on 6 June 2021
'Lenny Bartulin hopes his latest novel, which spans the globe over a century, will draw people together, as he tells Stephen Romei.'
'When Elisabeth and Johannes catch a glimpse of each other through a window at the start of Lenny Bartulin’s Fortune, it’s as if they already know one another. As the novel progresses we follow the separate journeys of these two characters, along with a cast of others, wondering if their paths will cross again.' (Introduction)
'Fortune begins with Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin on 27 October 1806. Does it matter whether the popular image of the emperor astride a magnificent white stallion is an embellishment? ‘Time sullies every truth,’ Lenny Bartulin tells us. History is as much a fiction as this tale of derring-do and dire misfortune heaped on innocent and wicked alike. Coincidence, improbable and highly amusing, propels the narrative in a series of fast-moving, often farcical vignettes that recall Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Joseph Furphy’s classic Australian yarn Such Is Life (1903).'(Introduction)
'Fortune begins with Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin on 27 October 1806. Does it matter whether the popular image of the emperor astride a magnificent white stallion is an embellishment? ‘Time sullies every truth,’ Lenny Bartulin tells us. History is as much a fiction as this tale of derring-do and dire misfortune heaped on innocent and wicked alike. Coincidence, improbable and highly amusing, propels the narrative in a series of fast-moving, often farcical vignettes that recall Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Joseph Furphy’s classic Australian yarn Such Is Life (1903).'(Introduction)
'When Elisabeth and Johannes catch a glimpse of each other through a window at the start of Lenny Bartulin’s Fortune, it’s as if they already know one another. As the novel progresses we follow the separate journeys of these two characters, along with a cast of others, wondering if their paths will cross again.' (Introduction)
'Lenny Bartulin hopes his latest novel, which spans the globe over a century, will draw people together, as he tells Stephen Romei.'
