A Summer Read: Fascinating new novel about Nazi hiding in post-war South America

Published by Wicked Son Books, SOLIMEOS is available in paperback and eBook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and all major bookstores.

A fascinating new novel about Nazis hiding in post-war South America is a great summer read.

(NAPSI)—A daring new novel called SOLIMEOS, by Rhoda Lerman, a critically-acclaimed author who passed away in 2015, imagines what life might have been like for Nazi officers and their families in South American exile after the Holocaust.

Wicked Son Books co-publisher Adam Bellow, who The New Yorker called “the hottest editor in New York,” is universally credited with knowing a good book when he reads one. When he learned that the deceased “authors’ author” Rhoda Lerman (whose work has been favorably compared to that of his father, Saul Bellow) had left an unpublished manuscript, he made it his mission to assure her literary legacy with the publication of what he believed was an “exceptional” novel.

In the waning days of World War II, fourteen-year-old Axel, his family, and their servants are cold and hungry in Pappendorf Castle. Baron Dietrich von Pappendorf, Axel’s father, is away, having spent much of the war traveling the world in search of an ancient, pre-Babel language that his occult-obsessed, Nazi masters believed would solidify Aryans as the master race. But when the baron returns to the family castle, it’s not in triumph. Axel and his family must flee Germany and embrace a life of luxurious exile in the Brazilian jungle. The von Pappendorfs take up residence in a gilded home originally built for Hitler that was carved from the hallucinogenic wilds of Amazonia.

Protected from Nazi hunters, the baron prepares for the Fourth Reich while Axel is guided by a shaman into the wisdom of the jungle. It is there the young man discovers ancient truths linking an Israelite king to a river known as Solimeos. Axel is also passionately in love with his father’s mistress: beautiful, Polish-Jewish Luba. He becomes torn between his love for his father, his desire for Luba, and the growing realization that he and his family can never atone for the past.

Utterly original, highly entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Rhoda Lerman’s SOLIMEOS – a provocative parable about the sins of the father visited upon the son – is a powerful and elegantly written story of family, fanaticism, and fate.

Highly recommended for book clubs and reading groups who enjoy historical fiction, SOLIMEOS—available in paperback and as an eBook—begs to be discussed.

The New York Times famously wrote: “Rhoda Lerman is a find. Go out and find her.”