Love Songs of the Revolution

About the novel

An official painter for the Lithuanian Communist Party, Martynas Kudirka enjoys a pleasant, unremarkable life with a beautiful wife and all the privileges that come with being a party member. Yet in the summer of 1989, his ordinary world suddenly turns upside down. Political revolt is breaking out across Eastern Europe, and Martynas comes home to find his wife dead on the kitchen floor with a knife in her back. 

Realizing the police will not investigate, he sets out to find his wife's killer. Instead, he stumbles upon her secret life. Martynas finds himself drawn into the middle of an independence movement, on a quest to find confidential documents that could free a nation. 

Cold War betrayals echo down through the years as author Bronwyn Mauldin takes the reader along a modern-day path of discovery to find out Martynas' true identity. Fans of historical fiction will travel back in time to 1989, the Baltic Way protest and Lithuania's "singing revolution," experiencing a nation's determination for freedom and how far they would fight to regain it.

This novel is among the first to utilize a series of modern media artifacts, including tweets, deleted scenes, IRS forms and book reviews as a storytelling device. 

  
Love Songs of the Revolution by Bronwyn Mauldin
Published by CCLaP, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
Cover by Ryan W. Bradley 

Want to learn more? Read our press release announcing the book's publication. 

inspiration

Inspiration for Love Songs of the Revolution came from a variety of places, including this fascinating video with music and images from the Baltic Way demonstration in 1989:

research

Read my essay at Necessary Fiction about how I did research for the novel:

SMALL TOWN, BROWN DOG
While researching my novel, Love Songs of the Revolution, I took a few hours one bright summer day to explore the streets of Švenčionėliai, a small town in Lithuania. Cottony clouds hung in the middle distance against a clear, blue sky. The streets were dry, but it must have rained recently because a few puddles stood at the edges of the streets..... Continue reading

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"Love Songs packs layered commentary on the nature of letters, the process of historiography, [and] the validity of memory." 
                           --Gint Aras, author of Finding the Moon in Sugar

"The mystery slides sleekly from one suspense, emotional pang, or clue to another, ensuring impeccable timing and delivery. Poetic gems glitter throughout. Mauldin is sensitive to detail and nuance, her prose is always vivid and alive."
                            --Jonathan Brown, The Baltic Times 

"The narration is so stylish and the tempo so compelling that we keep reading." 
                           --Kate Vane, Goodreads