Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. The Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel.
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear.
Every Man Dies Alone or Alone in Berlin (German: Jeder stirbt für sich allein) is a 1947 novel by German author Hans Fallada. It is based on the true story of a working class husband and wife who, acting alone, became part of the German Resistance. They were eventually discovered, denounced, arrested, tried and executed. Fallada's book was one of the first anti-Nazi novels to be published by a German after World War II.
Synopsis: At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...
The novel has been made into a film starring Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson and reviewed in The Guardian as follows:
Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies.
We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches for the mother he lost - and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence, while her own son feels overwhelmed by her complex sensitivities.
A penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul, the story of Olive Kitteridge will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain, and shed a tear or two.
The novel is structured to form a series of short stories: case histories through which is woven the character of Olive Kitteridge who may play a significant part, or almost none at all. All the members of my Dorset group rated this highly. A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr : Bernie Gunther Mystery 5 Philip Kerr writes an excellent thriller. He also writes for children. You can find out more about him following this link: http://philipkerr.org/about/ or https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/philip-kerr/198811/?mkwid=sSZLll4oZ|dc&pcrid={creative}&pkw=books&pmt=b&plc={placement}&utm_term=books&utm_campaign=Search+%7C+Dynamic+Search+Ad+Test&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing In A Quiet Flame, posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie's final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police. A case he had failed to solve.
Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down?
Redolent with atmosphere, this novel ends up asking some highly provocative questions about the true extent of Argentina's Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism under the Peróns. It is this engagement with political and historical issues that authenticates Kerr's novels and sets Kerr's thriller in a higher rank than the traditional crime/detective/thriller genre which makes for extremely popular reading.
Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover
of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.
In the Country of Men is Matar's debut novel first published in 2006 by Viking. It was nominated for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. It has so far been translated into 22 languages and was awarded the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize as well as a host of international literary prizes. The book was also nominated for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S.
The book follows the plight of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli in Libya, stuck between a father whose clandestine anti-Qaddafi activities bring about searches, stalkings and telephone eaves droppings by Qaddafi's state police, and a vulnerable young mother who resorts to alcohol to bury her anxiety and anger. The only people he has to turn to are his neighbour Kareem, and his father's best friend Moosa. The book provides a description of Libya under Qaddafi's terror regime, and a narration of ordinary people's lives as they try to survive the political oppression.
In a nutshell this novel, encompasses a crime story, an addiction-recovery narrative, and a family drama..
Abandoned by her parents as a baby, Maya has been brought up by her tough grandmother Nini and her gentle grandfather Popo. But at school, the teenage Maya finds herself drawn towards the wrong crowd. Before she knows what’s happened, Maya’s life has turned into one of drug addiction and crime. Things go from bad to worse as Maya disappears into the criminal underworld. To save her from her old associates, Nini sends Maya to a remote island off the coast of Chile. Safe amongst her new neighbours, Maya feels compelled to write her story and slowly she begins to heal. But can she learn to live with her scars, and will her past ever catch up with her?
Character portraits and sketches of other lives abound, although Maya is the main focus "with hair dyed four primary colours and a nose ring". In the opening pages we find Maya on a remote island in the Chiloe region of Chile, on the run from "the FBI, Interpol and a Las Vegas criminal gang." .
Fortunately, she has a loving grandmother who has arranged this sanctuary, and despite recent ordeals, her confident, upbeat nature soon charms the locals. She is smart and curious, and the novel brims with her discoveries about the archipelago and its people: tourist fantasies and harsher realities are described with great feeling. On the island Maya begins to write down her story, from her grandmother's flight from Chile in the early days of the Pinochet regime to her own childhood in Berkeley, teenage loss and three years of plummeting crisis. At the same time, the Chilotan narrative moves forward, and Maya gets involved in village life, forms close bonds, and begins to uncover horrors from the past.
Maya is the lightest of narrative guises: wise beyond her 19 years but convincingly coltish, she gives us an outsider's observations ("happiness seems kitsch to Chileans") and has a chirpy, wry sense of humour; when she falls in love, she writes her adoration and despair with hyperbole, exclamation marks and teenage wholeheartedness. The sections describing her own past are dominated by the energetic narrative impetus and lose track of any feelings of abandonment, terror and hurt at the story's centre. This may be due to the pressure applied by the crime plot, or the need to drive this book in the direction it is headed – towards a story of survival.
Maya used to read the dictionary with her beloved grandfather, something we're reminded of when she drops words such as "lapidary" and "telluric". Harder to reconcile are the almost anthropological observations, such as this, of her teenage gang: "We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language." Little of that coded language finds its way into the book, even during intense scenarios with her best friends and sometime boyfriend, a hapless fellow in low-slung baggy jeans. The slang is mild: "dumbass", "man". The crime boss she works with in Vegas explains, "Heroin doesn't kill: it's the addicts' lifestyles that do…" The effect is a bit like taking a bus tour through the desperate parts of Las Vegas, a guide delivering facts about life on the streets. You see a mugging through the window, but the bus has moved on.
The prioritising of story over voice suggests that it's not the aim of Maya's Notebook to plunge the reader into the grim existence of a real-life Maya; this is a tale of revelations and resolutions, and the plot is more answerable to its own turns than to the brutal possibilities of reality. Despite the observations about the number of young people lost to street violence, crime and slavery, or because of them, the driving force of this novel is ultimately resilience – the power of love and acceptance to face down terrible things.
In this worldview, perhaps, the wise perspective of the narrative voice can elide with the young narrator: "I'm not going to be weighed down [by past mistakes] till the day I die," Maya insists. Her argument is compelling. She hits some nasty snags on the way to her rock bottom, but emerges (after a rather idyllic sounding rehab) with her joy in life intact, able to heal others. Whether a consequence of characterisation, magical thinking or authorial determination, this girl and her community are going to be all right. "The whole world is magical," says Manuel, the man who has survived much and becomes Maya's protector, and the book is best read in that spirit.
, their triumphs and tragedies.
