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The Martyrs, The Lovers
a novel by Catherine Gammon
In Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, The Lovers, Jutta Carroll and her lover Lukas Grimm are found shot to death in their home. Was it a murder-suicide? Was it the work of their political enemies, or possibly someone close to them? From WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, The Martyrs, The Lovers is a novel wrought with the best of mystery, historical, and metafiction. Gammon, wielding prose like a surgical scalpel, peels back the layers of history to explore the forces and motivations–external and psychological–that drive politics, passion, and activism, as well as the counterforces that threaten their progress. By probing all of the possible motives behind Jutta and Lukas’s deaths, Gammon tells a tale of individual roles in world politics, considers the role of Western narrative structures, how and why we tell the stories that endure, and the (im)possibility of Truth.
Loosely based on the life and death of the activist and founder of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly, and her partner Gerd Bastien, The Martyrs, The Lovers calls attention to the perennial challenges that informed the lives and deaths of these activists; to environment, to peace, to justice, and to feminism, which, if anything, are more prevalent than ever today.
“Here is a fiction whose ingredients comprise both fiction and fact, although you wouldn’t call it historical fiction, even though it enfolds within the context of history; if it were bread, its yeast is fiction: it would not rise without the freedom and mystery that fiction offers the writer, the power to invent, to imagine, to invest oneself into the act of finding form and matter, even as the matter itself here is informed by fact, by the historical fact.
At times, the reader tends to want to know which is which, oddly part of the charm, and one must say that there’s a good argument for the writer to have made this choice.”
“Read this book and be seduced by Catherine Gammon’s stunning and complex political mystery of a martyr bearing witness in a dangerous world. Against a backdrop of America’s and Germany’s brutal histories, her lyrical yet frightening–then haunted and intimate–language crawls into the psyche of her characters. Gammon is an author whose books you can trust to shock and seduce. Brava for a new book–for our times.”
“Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, The Lovers offers readers Gammon’s characteristically precise, beautiful prose, but there is also a thrilling new uncanniness here. With The Martyrs, The Lovers, Gammon renders humane truth out of fiction based in fact. A Sebaldian pleasure, perhaps related to Maylis de Kerangal’s practice of ‘weav[ing] the documentary as a poem’ in its comfort with unknowableness, and without a doubt a thoroughly captivating story of the cruelties of ambition disappointed.”
Book Details
Title: The Martyrs, The Lovers
Author: Catherine Gammon
Publication Date: September 8, 2026
Trade Paperback
5.5 x 8.5 in.
278 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936097-74-6
$17.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
