Excerpt from Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But really, underneath it all, it was a lie. She was still pretending to be an artist. The human plumes of color she was producing were nothing. They were personal without being profound. Their impact was as meaningless as candle flames. A cough could blow them out. And they certainly weren't Art. Not real Art like the Art of her mother. Secretly, she was ashamed of how inconsequential they were. Ashamed but also relieved. Maybe she didn't need to be an artist. Maybe she could escape. Leave Eema's legacy behind with the ashes. Maybe she could simply be what her husband expected her to be. A wife and a mother. Those were both acceptable professions in his mind. Maybe she could sign on as a regular American woman. And if she painted a canvas or two on the side? Well, there was a word in English that took the curse off that. Hobby. A pastime, a way to pass time. And in the process, if she collected a few dollars doing it? Even better. It didn't mean she had to be—that she was doomed to be—her mother's daughter. Rachel could avoid a career with the same zealousness that Eema had cultivated hers.

But after Bellevue? After the Episode, there was no question. She had to face the truth. There was a monster inside her. Locked away so that no one could see it? Yes. But painting was dangerous. Painting baited the monster out into the open. It made her vulnerable to herself. Who was she trying to fool? God? History? Herself? She had forfeited her rights as an artist one day while seated in a Berlin café. So returning from Bellevue to their apartment on West Twenty-Second Street, she'd locked away her easel and closeted her Winsor & Newton painter's box. She no longer pretended that any of her soulless plumes of color had purpose. They were meaningless. Nishtik! They were trash, and she simply discarded them like New York litter, one at a time, leaving them behind on the subway or leaned against a fire hydrant in the street for dogs to piss on them.

Now? She confines herself to these scribbles. The Episode was a line of demarcation. After it, she could no sooner pick up a brush and apply paint to canvas than she could sprout wings and fly into the treetops. All that remains to her is the shmittshik. The doodle of her face mocking her warped reflection in a toaster. Her avowal of the truth of her inner distortion. The monster crouched so deeply within her.

Excerpted from Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham. Copyright © 2022 by David R. Gillham. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.