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To love someone, need you know everything about them? When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. Both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden. Alice's family is full of absences and Joseph harbours an unspeakable secret from his time in the army in Northern Ireland. When Alice's widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his RAF experiences in 1950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph; his reaction to the older man's unburdening of guilt is both unexpected and devastating for them all.
A history of 20th century Germany as experienced by three ordinary Germans.
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Dark Room, an extraordinary new novel: `A spellbinding evocation of fear and threat tinged with the possibility of hope and change' - Philippe Sands, author of East West Street Early on a grey November morning in 1941, only weeks after the German invasion, a small Ukrainian town is overrun by the SS. A Boy In Winter tells of the three days that follow and the lives that are overturned in the process. And in the midst of it all is the determined boy Yankel who will throw his and his young brother's chances of surviving to strangers. A Boy In Winter is a story of hope when all is lost, and of mercy when the times have none. 'Superb, delicately poised' FT 'Magnificent' Linda Grant 'A joy to read ' Helen Dunmore
Alice tacitly agrees with Kim's teachers when they hint that her daughter is not an easy child. A single mother of two, the bond with her second-born didn't present itself readily. Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Field Study.
Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room, powerfully evokes our need for human connection in this dazzling and haunting group of stories. Set against immense political upheaval, or evoking the intimate struggles between men and women, parents and children, this astonishing collection charts our desire for love, our fragility, and our strength. From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in “The Crossing,” to the old man weighing his regrets in “Francis John Jones, 1924–” Seiffert’s acclaimed, refined prose movingly captures the lives of her characters in their most essential, secret moments.
Now a Major Motion Picture, Lore (previously published as The Dark Room) is a powerful, suspenseful work of fiction that examines the legacy of World War II on ordinary Germans -- both immediate survivors of the war and future generations. A Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In the spring of 1945, weeks after the defeat of Germany, a teenage girl called Lore -- whose parents have been arrested by the Allies -- sets off with her four younger siblings on a 500-mile illegal trek through the four zones of occupation in search of their grandmother. This central episode of a novel in three parts is the basis for a new film.
Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has. Stevie's been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he's working as a labourer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But he's not told his family - what's left of them - that he's back. Not yet. He's also not far from his Uncle Eric's house: another one who left - for love this time. Stevie's toughened himself up against that emotion. And as for his own mother, Lindsey ... well, she ran her whole life. From her father and Ireland, from her husband, and eventually from Stevie too. This is a powerful novel about the risk of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift? Rachel Seiffert is an extraordinarily deft and humane writer who tells us the truth about love and about hope.
Winner of the HWA Sharpe Gold Crown for Best Historical Novel. An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel of a friendship tragically interrupted by war, by German author Ralf Rothmann. Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances. In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy. 'To Die in Spring holds its own against Günter Grass and Erich Maria Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership' – Guardian
Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across… A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers ‘acting on a tip-off’ and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape… An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention… These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Euro...