Guest review by Peter Crawley: THE JOURNAL OF HÉLÈNE BERR: a Young Jewish Woman's Life in Occupied Paris, translated from French by David Bellos

 

"The beauty in this in many ways tragic journal is the awakening of spirit, the blossoming of defiance and the hardening of determination not to be beaten by the ranks of evil."

Peter studied social, political and economic geography, and later languages at The Goethe Institut in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. Having written aural histories, obituaries and magazine articles throughout his life, in 2011 he returned to writing full-time. His first published novel, Mazzeri, about the shaman of Corsica, was published by Troubador in 2013. Subsequent works include Ontreto (Lipari, Sicily), Boarding House Reach (Norfolk), The Wind Between Two Worlds (London), The Truth in Fiction (short stories), What you Don’t Know About Me (a novella), and Constant Tides (Messina, Sicily), which has been translated into Italian. Theo’s Voice, a story of aphasia, is his latest work. Peter’s interests include listening to and researching personal histories and landscapes, believing that both our epoch and our surroundings shape us as much as our DNA. He lives in Midhurst, West Sussex, with his wife, Carol, and is currently writing a second novel set in Lipari, Sicily.

These days, if one was to lose an hour or two to the second-hand bookstalls of the Left Bank, or an afternoon to the gentle majesty of the Jardins de Tuileries, one might be forgiven for thinking le vieux Paris was forever thus – light of heart, perhaps even carefree. Yet the city was not always so.

In June 1940, Hélène Berr was nineteen when the German Army marched down the Champs-Élysées; she was studying English language and literature at the Sorbonne where, later, she was awarded the coveted Diplôme d’Études Supérieures for her thesis on ‘Shakespeare’s Interpretation of Roman History’. Born into a middle-class, secular Jewish family, Hélène was what some would have called strong-willed and others independent. Her father, a former artillery lieutenant wounded in the First World War, was deputy chairman of a major chemical and industrial group, and, as such, Raymond Berr was deemed by the Nazis to be a person of use, which meant his family were afforded protected status; a status that endured only until they were deported on the 27th of March 1944, Hélène’s twenty-third birthday. Two years earlier, the young woman had begun a diary, in which she recorded the passage of twists and turns that led her to that wretched day; a diary she deposited, often only pages at a time, with Andrée Bardieu, the cook who had remained in her father’s employ for more than half a century.

The first page of Hélène’s Journal, as it has become known in David Bellos’ brilliantly empathic translation, finds her wandering down the Avenue Victor Hugo, her thoughts consumed with the challenges of falling out of love with Gérard and in love with Jean, both of whom subsequently fled the country to join Free French Forces and in doing so survived the war. What these entries don’t tell us, however, is that by this time Hélène was working for the L’Entraide Temporaire, a clandestine organization committed to saving Jewish children from deportation. A letter to her sister, written on the day Hélène was arrested, reveals her use of codewords – Henri for her father; Minnie for her mother, Gaston Bébert for police station, Marcel for the police – and many of the entries describe her shepherding orphaned children to safety, while disguising their true destination. The narrative is almost poetic in its flow and the writing of the highest quality, yet the beauty in this in many ways tragic journal is the awakening of spirit, the blossoming of defiance and the hardening of determination not to be beaten by the ranks of evil, both foreign and domestic.

Some would call Hélène’s Journal a rite of passage through a dystopian landscape in which Jewish adults, adolescents and children were considered less than human and therefore treated inhumanely; I would call it an awakening, if not a clarion call. And to those who turn a tin ear to the Holocaust, I would say read this story of a young woman’s resistance – a resistance both physical and intellectual – and rage that one so talented, so compassionate and courageous, should be taken from the world before her time.

Much of her Journal is given over to philosophy and reflection, to the agonies and ecstasies of adolescence, and to the price one pays for being both ordinary and otherwise. Hélène understood her life was soon to end, and in one passage reasons that after death one lives on, if only in the memory of those still living. Now, because of her Journal, the name Hélène Berr will live on and remind us how truly fortunate we are to be light of heart and carefree.

There are three other exceptional books that deserve mention: the first is Anne Sebba’s Les Parisiennes (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), a fascinating and meticulously researched account of how the women of the city ‘lived, loved and died’ through the occupation; the second is Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Vintage) which, although classified as fiction, provides a stark reminder of what it took to survive; and the third is A Life In Secrets (Abacus), Sarah Helm’s exceptional history of ‘Vera Atkins and the lost agents of the Special Operations Executive’, in which we come to know the women, and some of the men, parachuted into France during the Second World War, the majority of whom were never to return. Neither Irène Némirovsky nor Hélène Berr lived to see the war’s end; both were murdered, brutally, by the Nazis.

Like so many, their names must never be forgotten.

The Journal of Hélène Berr is published by MacLehose Press. The French edition is published by Tallandier.

Peter's latest novel, Theo's Voice, is published by Troubador

Special feature: Q&A with Sue Purkiss about her first novel for adults, AN ORDINARY WAR

 

"I realised in the end that the Dad I knew wasn’t the young man who’d been through the war. Harry isn’t Dad, though they shared some of the same experiences ... "

 Sue Purkiss has enjoyed parallel careers in teaching and writing. Starting as an English teacher in secondary schools, she went on to work with children who were out of school for medical reasons, and with young offenders. She also spent five years working as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Bristol and Exeter Universities, and has taught creative writing in the community for more than twelve years.

Her books until now have been for children. They include historical fiction (Jack Fortune, Warrior King and Emily’s Surprising Voyage, which was long-listed for the Carnegie), and a contemporary novel, The Willow Man, as well as several retellings and a life of Shakespeare. An Ordinary War is her first novel for adults. 

Sue lives in Somerset, whose magical landscapes provide the settings and inspiration for several of her stories. 

Sue answers questions from Linda Newbery.

-        Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your first novel for adults, and we’re delighted that its home is with Writers Review Publishing! An Ordinary War is partly based on your father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war. Did he talk about this, or was he – like Harry – silent on the subject?

Sue: Thank you, and I’m very happy to be part of Writers’ Review Publishing!

Dad only started to talk about his experiences late in life – and then, it was mostly about the funny bits (many of which have made their way into the book).  There were some things that he remembered with fondness: he enjoyed working in forestry, and he often spoke with relish of the pea and ham soup which was made by the farmer’s wife on one of the work camps he was on. He only rarely referred to the darker bits: I do remember him saying once that no-one knows what they’re capable of until they’ve been really hungry. (When he came home in 1945, he weighed, I think, about six and a half stone.) He also talked about how he was captured on the way to Dunkirk.

-        Linda: Did he keep a journal, as Harry does in the story, and if so when did you first become aware of it?

Sue: He did keep a journal, but sadly, it didn’t make it home with him. On that long march across the north of Germany in the bitterly cold winter of 1945 – which is described in the book – he sold it to a Russian, who wanted the paper for cigarettes. The Russian gave him a loaf of bread for it. Such a shame! I do have some documents, but they are mostly letters written to him by his mother and sisters before they knew he had been captured – the army returned the letters to the family, which is why I have them. One, from his mother, is particularly poignant: she’s obviously very anxious because she hasn’t heard from him, and begs him to find a minute to drop her a line.

-        Linda Which parts of the story are based directly on what happened to him?

Sue: Harry and Dad both come from a working-class background in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, and they share the same family – a mother and five sisters: Dad’s father died when he was fourteen. The route of his journey into and out of captivity is the same. Art, Harry’s friend, is very loosely based on Shep, whom he met when they were both POWs, and with whom he stayed in touch for the rest of his life. I met Shep: a lovely, gentle person. Zofi and most of the other POWs are completely made up: Eamon has some of the characteristics of someone I met once or twice at university and for some reason always remembered – but he was one of those characters who really took on a life of his own. I’m very fond of Eamon, rascal as he is! RSM Lord was a real person, and was at the camp at Fallingbostel: I remember Dad talking about him.

-        Linda: What kind of research did you do for the story? I know that you’ve visited several of the places, which must have been very moving.

Sue: After Dad died, in 2004, I decided to try and find out more about his wartime experiences. I knew that there were very large gaps in my knowledge of what had happened to him. I started off with the Imperial War Museum, and they were very helpful. They recommended some books – one by someone who must also have been taken prisoner at or on the way to Dunkirk, and was in the same prison camps in Poland as he was. That was very useful – I’ve credited it and the other main ones I used at the end of the book.

They also told me that returning prisoners of war were supposed to fill in a form outlining their experiences, and that all of these are kept at the National Archives in Kew. So that was my next trip.

And it was unexpectedly moving. When I put in my request, the archivist warned me that though everyone was supposed to fill in one of these forms, not everyone did: it was possible that Dad’s form wouldn’t be there. Knowing Dad’s approach to form-filling (one, unfortunately, which he passed on to me), I resigned myself to the likelihood that he would somehow have managed to avoid it, and I leafed through the thick file without any real expectation of finding his form.

But it was there. And what I hadn’t anticipated was that it would have been in his own, very distinctive handwriting: he enjoyed writing letters, and I’d had so many of them over the years that his writing was instantly recognisable. As I looked at it, I had, as they say, a moment.

This form told me exactly which camps he had been in – all of them in Poland except for the last one. It told me of his escape attempts and punishments: there was a question as to whether he’d been badly treated, but he brusquely shrugged this one off, and I could tell that by this stage he was getting impatient and wanted to be off.

Some time after this I visited the site of one of the camps, Torun, in Poland, known during the war as Thorn. In this I was extremely fortunate to have the help of my son’s Polish partner, Joanna – I couldn’t have done it without her.

-        Linda:What were you reading before or during the writing?

Sue: I read all the books I could find about how prisoners of war were treated by the Germans – there’s a list in the book. They were amazing books – so carefully researched, but so readable. There’s also an online BBC archive called The People’s War, which gathered together people’s experiences of the war, and is still available. That was both useful and fascinating.

-        Linda: Which were the hardest parts to write?

Sue: It wasn’t hard to write, though I kept changing my mind as to how to begin and end it.

What was hard was that I’d wanted in the beginning to get across Dad’s character, and the way he viewed his experiences. He didn’t feel any animosity towards the Germans – he always said there were good and bad people, same as you’d find anywhere. But he did draw a sharp distinction between the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht.

But I realised in the end that the Dad I knew wasn’t the young man who’d been through the war. Harry isn’t Dad, though they shared some of the same experiences.

-        Linda: Is this something you’ve felt compelled to write for some time?

Sue: Yes, I did feel compelled to write it. It seemed to me that the only stories I’d read about the experience of being a POW in Germany/Poland were set in officers’ camps and they were different in several significant ways: in particular, officers weren’t obliged to go out on work camps – so presumably they had more time to concoct ingenious escape plans. And I always felt a bit short-changed, on occasions when the rescue from Dunkirk was – absolutely rightly – celebrated: but with only a rare mention of the 30,000 or so who were not rescued, and who therefore spent five years of their young lives in captivity. I wanted to redress that a little bit.

-        Linda: You’ve written mainly for children till now, although I know you’ve had some success with short stories for adults, in competitions. Do you think you’ll continue writing for adults?

Sue: Yes, I think so. But who knows? Sometimes an idea beckons, and you follow…

-        Linda:What are you working on now?

Sue: I’m working on short stories – many of them arising from the lives of artists, or from their paintings.

Linda: Thank you - and I know An Ordinary War will be enjoyed by its readers!

An Ordinary War is the sixth title from Writers Review Publishing.

The other titles are:

The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt

Spirit of the Place by Dennis Hamley

David: the Unauthorised Autobiography by Mary Hoffman 

The One True Thing by Linda Newbery

Miss McVey Takes Charge by Sheena Wilkinson

Guest feature by Alice Jolly: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE? - a round-up

 

"Women write about war in a way which is different from the approach generally taken by men and their stories of collaboration often have a painful authenticity ..."

Alice Jolly’s most recent novel The Matchbox Girl (Bloomsbury, 2025) won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Her novel Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was runner up for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize and she has also won the Pen Ackerley Prize, the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and an O. Henry Award (20 best short stories in the US). She taught creative writing at Oxford University for sixteen years and reviews for The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. 

The English have always been obsessed by the Second World War and why not? After all, we won and they lost. But is it really that simple? As we watch the rise of the far right in America, it is suddenly not so easy to accept a simplistic version of the past.

All around us, people are increasingly having to ask themselves the questions which haunted Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Could I make I make personal sacrifices to protect democracy and diversity? What if I had to choose between speaking the truth and protecting the safety of my family?
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These are questions which I tried to unravel in my recent novel The Matchbox Girl, but these same issues have also recently been tackled by other excellent writers. Women write about war in a way which is different from the approach generally taken by men and their stories of collaboration often have a painful authenticity.

So here are recommendations of four exceptional books (three novels and a memoir) which take a fearless approach to questions of denial and complicity.

Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert, Virago 2025

Rachel Seiffert has written three novels all of which focus on the German experience of the Second World War and its aftermath. Her most recent book (shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize) is centred on a small town in Germany during and after the war. It is a novel of diffuse viewpoints, deftly steering the reader in and out of the lives of a huge range of characters but centring, in particular, on a camp for displaced people and the English Red Cross volunteer who is in charge. A graceful, quiet, subtle novel about a nation facing up to appalling mistakes and misdeeds, it is entirely immersive and quietly powerful. I particularly loved the final sections.

The Mare by Angharad Hampshire, Hamish Hamilton, forthcoming in August 2026

This is Angharad Hampshire's first novel but it is written with such fluency and confidence that you would never know. She tells the story of Ryan and Hermine (both of whom actually existed). They are living in the suburbs of New York in the 1960s when a journalist from the New York Times knocks on the door and accuses Hermine of having been a concentration camp guard. Hampshire writes this story in alternating first person voices switching from the thoughts of Hermine to those of Ryan. It should be the case that we soon hate Hermine – and we do – and yet strangely we cannot entirely dismiss her. What did she do? And is there any truth is her assertion that she is being made a scapegoat for a wider system? Gripping, dark and disturbing, this is a novel which helps us understand how an initially harmless person is drawn into acts of absolute evil.

33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen, Bloomsbury 2025

I have to confess that I loved Alice Austen’s novel partly for very personal reasons. It is set in Brussels where I lived for sixteen years, and it is focused on a particular square which is just round the corner from where I used to live. What struck me as I read the novel was that, despite knowing Brussels so well, I have never really had any discussions with Belgians about their city’s wartime history. This is hardly surprising because (as for many occupied countries) facing the past is simply too difficult. Austen, as an American, gives voice to the city’s hidden pain. Her novel is quiet, beautifully written and utterly absorbing. Full of memorable characters and devastating scenes, it is a master class in what the best of historical fiction can achieve.

In My Grandfather’s Shadow by Angela Findlay, Bantam 2022

Angela Findlay’s extraordinary memoir tells the story of her German grandfather who was a General on the Eastern front in the second world war. Angela sets out to find out the truth about who he was and what he did – and also how his hidden legacy has impacted her own life. She writes with endless curiosity about the long shadow of war and the impact of intergenerational trauma, asking – how do comprehend the incomprehensible, love the unlovable, forgive the unforgiveable?

Alice's The Matchbox Girl is reviewed here by Jane Rogers.

Guest review by Jane Rogers: THE MATCHBOX GIRL by Alice Jolly

 

"As with all the best historical fiction, Jolly has written a novel which is only too relevant to our times ... "

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her latest collection of climate-themed short stories, Fire-Ready, is out now in paperback; five of the stories were read on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in March 2026. For a review by Lesley Glaister, and a Q&A with Jane, see below. For more information, see Jane's website.

This is an extraordinarily ambitious novel, set in Vienna before and during World War 2, and based on real events.

In Vienna in 1934 there’s a progressive residential centre for children with learning difficulties, children who today would be termed neurodivergent. The director is kindly, humane scientist Dr A (the real life Asperger). Our heroine and narrator, Adelheid, is a mute 12 year old inpatient. She has an unusual mind, the kind of mind Dr A is researching in order to better understand and teach children like her.

Instead of speaking, Adelheid writes things down; her passion for the truth, her intelligence, and her eagle-eyed attention to detail, make her a valuable assistant to Dr A, and over time she progresses from patient to member of staff. These qualities also make her a brilliantly unbiassed chronicler of the Nazis’ growing power and influence over Viennese life. Initially, like everyone else, she’s thrilled by the pomp and pageantry, the marching and singing.

But gradually she notices that certain staff members are disappearing – fleeing to America, or simply vanishing overnight. Jewish people. She observes that Dr A is being put under increasing pressure to turn his patients into ‘useful’ citizens. And that those who are unlikely to ever be ‘useful’ are being transferred to the sinister Am Spiegelgrund, a new children’s hospital where visitors are not permitted, and children are never heard of again.

This is a truly heart-breaking coming of age story, as naïve, truth-seeking Adelheid gradually comes to understand not only the extent of Nazi wickedness, but also to recognise the necessity – for people like Dr A – of playing along with it, in order to retain any agency at all. It is a bitterly accurate portrayal of the way in which fascist thinking can creep into people’s lives, and how, without in any way subscribing to antisemitism or child euthanasia, bystanders can become complicit. As with all the best historical fiction, Jolly has written a novel which is only too relevant to our times.

The subject matter is tragic, but mercifully this novel is not only uplifting, but often comic, thanks to Adelheid’s eccentric and original narrating voice. Here’s a taster:

‘I begin this Story on the day of 25 July 1934, a moment well known in the History of my Country of Austria. Personally, I do not remember that Day for the same reasons as do others. The World is so Extremely Busy, many things Happening all at once. (Adelheid – Do not go off down a Tram Track. Stick to the Facts.) The point is that on this day here is Adelheid Brunner (twelve years old) and she is arriving at the World-Famous Weiner Kinderklinik or Vienna Children’s Hospital. She has in her pocket Franz Joseph, who is named after a Habsburg Emperor, but is a Rat.’

The Matchbox Girl is published by Bloomsbury.

Jane Rogers' Fire-Ready reviewed by Lesley Glaister.

A Q&A with Jane about Fire-Ready.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH by Richard Flanagan

 

"He writes with passion, sensitivity and somehow retains his composure even in face of the worst details of the story he is telling."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

The Bushido code ‘Warrior’s path’ has governed Japan's warrior classes from the 8th century. Making no distinction between life and death, its principles still feature highly in Japanese culture

This compelling novel’s true and grim story stretched my comprehension but humans have the capacity for so much and we are only ever a step away, circumstantially and emotionally, from being something we daren’t consider, let alone truly know. We must face the problem of being unable to understand, to embrace that unknowable, aware that there’s probably no conclusive answer; no final full stop only ever a hanging comma on which we sit, as on a swing in a hidden garden. Flanagan himself says: ‘Horror is just horror.’

The title comes from a collection of Basho’s writings marking the high point of Japanese culture whereas this novel relates events at its lowest point: building a railway (never used) through the Burmese jungle, cleared largely with blunt tools by prisoners of war who were sickly, ill-fed, maltreated, beaten for disobedience – despite simply being too ill or weak to comply - by guards aware that if they failed to obey orders to beat disobedient prisoners they themselves would be thrashed. Such is the impasse of horror at the heart of this novel. It deals with terrible circumstances: the inhumanity of war and, in this war’s theatre, an irreconcilable clash of cultures. To Japanese bred on the warrior cult, the very notion of prisoner-of-war was incomprehensible: why would anyone surrender rather than die and save face? A man who had given in made himself less than a man so that whatever happened to him, didn’t matter. Impossible demands were made because the Emperor required them and refusal was unthinkable

The courage and nerve required to go to the core of what must seem to many of us an ugly absurdity are remarkable, and Flanagan has overcome his obvious dismay at the chronicling of this wretched episode in what is already a wretched circumstance – war, that grievous misuse of human action which makes victims of both the warrior and his foe. He writes with passion, sensitivity and somehow retains his composure even in face of the worst details of the story he is telling and it is, I feel, a story that needs to be told. It’s no good our saying that we do not need to know something merely because it happened, I say that awareness of both aspects of human nature, the evil and the magnanimous, impinge most powerfully on our own willingness to acknowledge our own incomprehension and to accept, if painfully, that we do not understand. I don’t and this wonderful novel encourages us to walk our own narrow road to that depth of incomprehension.

If we don’t hold to bushido as we revile war, armed conflict, the lingering impulse to belligerence, then it’s important to see that there have been elements of it in the culture that we inherited – the Roman general falling on his sword to avoid the ignominy of humiliation after defeat; the abject men who lost their nerve on the killing fields and mud of the Western Front: shot at dawn as an example to others and buried in honour’s graveyard…

Flanagan writes beautifully and with compassion which is the real test of his own fearlessness in telling a fearful story: his description of the young, miserable, ill-nourished ill-clad Japanese soldiers tramping along the wearisome jungle miles past the lines of hapless prisoners who may even have envied them their energy, diminished as it was: at least they could stand up and carry equipment yet were treated cruelly by vicious compadres ‘just obeying orders’.

‘To live was to struggle through terror and pain but, he told himself, one had to live’ is, if amazingly, what somehow rescued those beaten, diseased and broken men. And the ingenuity of some of the men with them, particularly the doctor Dorrigo Evans, in many ways the story’s protagonist, also strains belief: conducting operations with hardly any medical equipment, by sheer determination to get the necessary job done to save a man. It doesn’t always end happily and his own life – before, during then afterwards, his passionate love, his bravery, told in time jumps of the narrative which work well, here – underpins a novel which conveys the sense of something unquenchable in the human spirit, despite the inhumanity it encounters and, as one character says: ’Lest we forget, we say. Isn’t that what we say?’ Crowning the story, the wondrous redemption through self-knowledge and moral strength of a surviving prisoner, Bigelow, ‘haunted only by the way he was haunted by so little of it’.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is published by Chatto & Windus.

Graeme's Memory's Ransom is published by The Conrad Press.

Q&A: Jane Rogers interviews Lesley Glaister about her new novel, A PARTICULAR MAN

"I always like to be utterly certain of each character’s motivation at any one time – even if they aren’t sure of it themselves ..."

Lesley Glaister has written numerous novels, as well as short stories, drama and poetry. Alongside her writing she has worked as a tutor and mentor in Creative Writing in settings ranging from Crete to The University of St Andrews. Her most recent novel, A Particular Man, is set in the 1940s, and looks at love, marriage and sexuality in the post-war period. Find out more on her website.

Jane Rogers: Congratulations on your 14^th (??) novel, Lesley! It’s a completely engrossing read, and your characters continue to haunt me, especially Starling and Aida, that unlikely couple who almost certainly will not live happily ever after.

My first question is probably foolish, but I found myself puzzling over whether the ‘particular man’ of the title was Starling, or the absent Edgar?

Lesley Glaister: Thank you, Jane. It’s my 16^th or 17^th novel, depending on whether you count my YA novel, Aphra’s Child. The title: A Particular Man, came late. I had several other working titles including A Hole in the Corner Affair – but no-one else seemed to like that!  A Particular Man jumped into my mind while I was washing up one evening and it immediately felt right. It has both the meanings that you suggest. Starling is a particular man, of course, and he’s the particular man Aida falls in love with. But in a larger sense, the particular man who drives the whole dynamic of the novel is the absent Edgar.

JR: Speaking of Edgar - one of the things I love in the book is that everyone has their own story and secrets; Clem’s affair with famous artist Corin; Starling’s forbidden homosexual love for Edgar; Aida’s attraction to Starling which she tries to blot out by getting engaged to Neville. But the link between all the characters is Edgar, as son, as brother, as beloved comrade. And he is dead, and remains a total mystery. We have no idea if he returned Starling’s love, and even Starling doesn’t know. What made you decide to keep such a key character blank?

LG: Ha, good question! It wasn’t a decision. When I set out to write this novel, which has connections with Blasted Things, set twenty-five years earlier, I intended that Edgar, who was an infant in that novel, should be a central character. I kept trying to write scenes for him but he remained stubbornly inanimate. I couldn’t breathe life into him, or see him or hear him, and eventually I realised he was dead. For me writing is full of discoveries like this, rather than decisions. But I did decide to leave ambiguous the question of whether Starling’s love might have been requited if Edgar had lived. I think it would or might have been, but Edgar died so, like Starling, we will never know. 

JR: Your writing is wonderfully vivid, transporting the reader instantly into the scenes and characters’ feelings you describe. Here’s an example taken at random:

Aida hurries out of the hammering rain into the puddled shelter of St Pancras. As arranged, he’s waiting outside W H Smith, and her heart jerks like a bad dog on a lead.

How much revision does it take to achieve this kind of economy and joyous precision?

LG: Thank you! That is a huge compliment coming from a writer of your calibre. The honest answer is that those kind of similes and metaphors just seem to come naturally. Like many writers (and, of course, many people who aren’t writers) I tend to think in metaphor most of the time. Sometimes I drive myself mad with my habit of always thinking things are like this or that other thing. I have to work much harder at revising other elements of the narrative though: scenes where people have to move and act, dialogue, shifts through time etc. I always cut huge swathes in the editing process, and hone and sharpen scenes to try and rid them of any flab. I always like to be utterly certain of each character’s motivation at any one time – even if they aren’t sure of it themselves. 

JR: The novel is set in 1946 and also refers back to the war years and to the experiences of prisoners of war in Singapore. You don’t acknowledge any sources, but I’m guessing you did a huge amount of research, because the post-war world you conjure feels totally authentic. The menus are a particular delight (lobster mayonnaise and chocolate meringue!) and there are lots of details which are new to me, e.g. the choice of demob suits offered to ex-servicemen.  Can you tell us a bit about researching the background?

LG: One of my main sources was a box of family memorabilia. This includes photographs, letters, and artefacts relating to my father and his family. My dad was a Far East Prisoner of War in World War 2, a fact that was never spoken about in our family while he was alive. It was only after his death that I became fascinated both by his experience and the silence that surrounded it. In 1994 I wrote a novel called Easy Peasy, which is about that silence within a family.  At the time I did a fair amount of research, met a friend of my father from his time in Burma, read letters and newsletters written at the time. The tobacco tin of sketches in A Particular Man, was a real thing, though in real life it was a secret diary written on minute scraps of paper, also wrecked by a trapped ant. I find this idea very resonant. A letter from Edgar that Aida reads out loud to her mother is, in part, a letter that my father sent his mother when he was on his voyage to Singapore. There were also letters from my dad’s sister Kitty, who was killed during the Blitz and I was keeping her in mind for the character of Aida – though of course I never knew her.

As well as this family research, I also read reams of fiction set (and preferably written) during or shortly after the war as well as social histories. I watched films and TV documentaries and visited the Imperial War Museum. From all of these sources, I magpied away details of everyday life, such as those you mentioned, and the vocabulary of the times too. And of course I spent a lot of time Googling!

JR: I very much enjoyed the unsent letters from Aida to Starling. It’s a clever way of letting the reader into her thoughts. You also have Starling’s diary entries to reveal his inner feelings. But the larger part of the novel is written in the third person, from the restricted points of view of Aida, Starling and Clementine. How did you arrive at that writerly choice?

LG: Point of View is one of my obsessions and that close third person viewpoint is my favourite position from which to write. It means there is as little of the narrator showing as possible and all the narrative is filtered through the consciousness of the character in question. Sometimes, because of this restriction, it can be frustrating. For instance, I might think up just the right word, or image, but know that it wouldn’t be in the character’s vocabulary, or experience. With each novel I write I tend to wait for the first inklings of a voice to arrive. If it arrives in first person, I’ll go with that. The novel I’m writing at the moment, which spins off in an unusual direction from this one, is in the first person. One point of view I haven’t attempted yet is an omniscient third person – it simply looks too hard to control. I enjoyed using the first person for the letters and diaries and found it gave me extra insight into the characters of Starling and Aida. It was also a way of getting through a great deal of story in a reasonably economical way. 

 JR: How difficult was it to write using the point of view of a gay man in 1946?

LG: Oddly, I didn’t find it hard at all. I did a fair amount of reading including from a book called Curing Queers: Mental Nurses and Their Patients 1935-74 by Tommy Dickinson, which was excellent. I also did a lot of Googling and I was careful to run it past a gay male reader to ensure I hadn’t made any real howlers. 

 JR: And, leading on from that question, where do you stand on the whole vexed issue of appropriation? Do you think it’s OK for writers to write about people from different cultural/racial/social backgrounds to their own?

LG: Yes I do!  Of course, if a writer pretends to be something they’re not in order to write from a particular viewpoint, that’s wrong. If a writer writes cruelly or inaccurately or causes any hurt from their writing, that’s wrong too. But I can’t see why any human being can’t sensitively and intuitively try to enter into the experience of any other. Surely that’s part of what creative writing is about?

JR: I know this novel was originally slated to be published by Sandstone, and that Sandstone then went into receivership. Can you tell us about the bumpy road to publication?

LG: A miserable tale!  It’s so hard to get a novel published these days unless one is already a best-seller or a new writer on the brink of being discovered. For those of us that have published several (or many) novels, none of which have won a major prize, or been turned into a major movie (or maybe even if they have) publishers just aren’t interested. We are quite simply, out of fashion. This is true in my experience of the major traditional publishers, at least. Fortunately, there are smaller independent publishers – Sandstone was one – which work on a similar model but have more regard for quality rather than simply profitability. Sandstone published Blasted Things and I’d signed a contract with them for A Particular Man before they went into liquidation. I was left rather in the wilderness until Bloodhound came to my rescue. They differ from traditional publishers in being more focused on selling digital and audio copies than hard copies of books, though they do produce these too. I am very grateful that they have not only published A Particular Man but will also be reissuing Blasted Things later this year.

 JR: Finally – the limericks! They are great fun. Are they all your own work? I knew you were a poet, but I didn’t know you had a talent for limericks!

LG: They were fun to do. I sometimes think of limericks when I’m out walking my dog – it seems to suit the rhythm of my walking. Sometimes that rhythm drives me nuts. Most of the ones in the novel are my own, though one is adapted from someone else’s and the one that Peter quotes to Starling towards the end is, as he says, ‘an old chestnut’.

Thanks for these lovely questions. You have really made me think!

JR: Thank you for your generous answers, and for a fascinating novel! I think I like it even more now I know how closely it is based on your own family’s experiences. 

A Particular Man is published by Bloodhound Books.

Jane Rogers' review choices for Writers Review:

How the One Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

On dramatising No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

Jane's dramatisation of Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, about one family's troubles during the partition of India in 1946, is currently on Radio 4. Listen here to the first of two parts.

SEVENTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Anthony Horowitz chooses THE ESCAPE ARTIST by Jonathan Freedland

 

"A study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read."

Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – and is unique for working across so many media. A born polymath, he juggles writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been turned into a hugely successful TV series by Amazon Freevee. A third series has just been filmed and the fourteenth Alex Rider novel, Nightshade: Revenge will be out later this year.

Also an acclaimed writer for adults, Anthony was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation novels for James Bond with Trigger Mortis and Forever and Day, published in 2015 and 2018 respectively. A third novel in the series, With a Mind to Kill, was published in May 2022.

Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was published in October 2016 to critical acclaim and was serialised on BritBox at the beginning of 2022 with Lesley Manville in the lead role. It was televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will begin filming in September 2023. His new series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz has four books so far: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill and the recently published The Twist of a Knife. Anthony has just started work on a fifth: Close to Death.

Anthony is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most beloved and successful television series including Midsomer Murders and he is the writer and creator of award-winning drama series Foyle’s War, which was the Winner of the Lew Grade Audience award for BAFTA.

Anthony was awarded a CBE in 2022 for his services to literature.

(photo credit: Canneseries/Olivier Vigerie 2022)

 

I’ve always had misgivings about books about Auschwitz. The evil of the place is so overwhelming, its darkness so profound, that how can any writer find anything new to add to what is already an extensive library on the subject? And there is a danger that repetition will only blunt the horror of it all. I visited the camp one February, a few years ago, and standing there in my jersey, gloves and puffer jacket, but still colder than I had ever been, I wondered how anyone could have survived even a week there (the average life expectancy was actually four months). Meanwhile, all around me, other visitors were taking selfies. 

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland, which came out last year and is now in paperback, is a brilliant and important piece of writing because it tells a story that is less well-known, because it finds fresh details to illustrate the horrors of life inside the camp but above all because its focus extends far beyond the gas chambers and the electrified fences. In terrible detail, it explains how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Its central protagonist, Walter Rosenberg, was just nineteen years old when he became the first Jew to escape from the camp, hiding in a tiny dug-out beneath a pile of wood and covering himself in petrol-soaked tobacco to put off the guard dogs. This breathless sequence – he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, were just seconds away from being discovered – is extremely tense; a reminder that, under another name, Freedland has written many successful thrillers.

Once out, the two men had to travel 75 miles through enemy territory to reach the border with Slovakia. “Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely on their own. The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world…” And this is the nub of the matter. The descriptions of life inside Auschwitz are horrific enough. The casual murders, the starvation, the daily torture are detailed in sombre, effective prose. But as incredible as it may sound, what happens to Walter (who renames himself Rudolf Vrba) is in some ways even worse.

He had escaped in order to tell the world what was happening. “If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?” A scientist and a mathematician gifted with an extraordinary memory, he described his ordeal to a Jewish organisation in Bratislava – the UZ – and the result was The Auschwitz Report which detailed everything from the arrival of the transports from different parts of Europe to the numbers and even the names of those who perished. The final list numbered 1,765,000 dead in just two years.

Almost nobody cared. Nobody did anything. The Catholic church responded to their report with silence. Copies of the report got ‘lost in the post’. Jewish community leaders who did receive it dithered. The Americans were lethargic. Churchill read the document but his response was ineffectual. “What can be done?” he wrote to Anthony Eden. “What can be said?” The British did consider air strikes on Auschwitz or even on the railways leading to the camp. They decided not to.

Jonathan Freedland does not lose faith with his subject. “His life was defined by what he had endured as a teenager. But he was not crushed by it.” Even so, reading the second half of this book, it’s hard not to feel that Rosenberg does not come out of it as quite the hero he most certainly was even if he is credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people. For him, it wasn’t enough. The last part of the book describes a life that self-destructs. He falls out with Fred Wetzler and also with his daughter. An inveterate womaniser, he divorces his childhood sweetheart and wife. He moves from country to country and seems to have few friends. When he dies, in 2006, just forty people come to his memorial service.

The Escape Artist is a complex portrait of a man who was no artist and who never really escaped from the shadows of Auschwitz or, indeed, from himself. It is a study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read.

The Escape Artist is published by John Murray

Guest review by Keren David: DAUGHTERS OF THE LABYRINTH by Ruth Padel

 

"In an age of Holocaust fiction which is often sentimental and offers a false narrative of hope, this book gets it right again and again."

Keren David Keren David is the author of 13 books for teenagers. Her latest is Say No to the Dress (Barrington Stoke). She is also editor of the Jewish Chronicle's JC2 arts and lifestyle section. 

“It is a small peaceful hall, full of silence, glinting with textiles in deep earth-colours like a rusty rainbow, amethyst, chocolate, burgundy. White arches. A sheaf of open doors through which I see a patch of garden. Light filters down from high windows onto polished benches glimmering with embroidered cushions. On the left is a wood panel hung with taffeta of smoky topaz. Rose-brown silk lies lightly over a large book open on a lectern.” 

The description is of the Etz Hayyim (‘Tree of Life’) synagogue in Chania, Crete, and it comes from Ruth Padel’s novel Daughters of the Labyrinth which was published in 2021. I visited the synagogue this year - a tiny building tucked away in a corner of the maze of streets and alleyways which were once the port’s Jewish quarter. An exhibition at the synagogue tells the story of the Jewish community, which had lived there for thousands of years, until the Nazis invaded. Rounded up and imprisoned, the Jews of Chania died when they were put onto a ship to be taken to the death camps. A British torpedo, fired in the belief that the ship was carrying munitions, killed them all. The synagogue was neglected and despoiled, but in later years restored, despite several arson attacks.  

I found Daughters of the Labyrinth in the synagogue’s bookshop and spent the rest of our week in Crete reading it. Undoubtedly the effect of the book was enhanced by my surroundings – there is something very special about being able to compare a writer’s descriptions with the places around you. But I think the emotional impact of the story - which moved me to tears several times - and my admiration for the writing and the authenticity with which Padel writes would have been the same wherever in the world I was. And in fact the book begins and ends in the part of north London where I live, and right at the end Ri, the protagonist, visits the synagogue which I belong to. Ri is an artist, from Crete but living in London, recently widowed and adjusting to life alone. One of the many joys of the book is the way Padel thinks and writes about art, and the artist’s eye that Ri beings to her descriptions. She is planning a trip to India to paint, but a call comes from her family in Crete – her mother is ill. So she returns to Chania where her mother asks a question which changes everything she thought she knew about her family and her history. “Will you say kaddish for me?”  

Kaddish is the prayer that Jewish mourners say for their loved ones (and indeed, in that tiny, restored synagogue in Chania, I said kaddish for my mother). But Ri’s mother, as far as she knows, is not Jewish. While her mother lies ill in the hospital Ri asks her father what on earth her mother means. And slowly a story unfolds – of heroism, tragedy and a girl who had to hide who she was, a Sara who became Sophia in order to survive and live with the huge trauma of being the lone survivor of her family and her community.  

The pictures that Padel paints, of the lost Jewish community, the Cretan world around them, of Chania in the 1940s and now, of post Brexit Britain, of a world in the grip of Covid, all ring true. Padel’s deep knowledge of Greek mythology underpins the story and so does her 13 years of research. In an age of Holocaust fiction which is often sentimental and offers a false narrative of hope, this book gets it right again and again. Padel is better known as a poet and an academic, this is only her second novel. I will be seeking out her first, and also her poetry and non-fiction. If you are looking for a book which is satisfying on every level, I recommend Daughters of the Labyrinth.

Daughters of the Labyrinth is published by Corsair.

Below: the synagogue and streets of Chania. Photographs by Keren David.

Guest review by Leslie Wilson: WE GERMANS by Alexander Starritt

 

"The great strength of this part of the novel is that it makes the soldiers, and particularly Meissner, real people. Not monsters, but human beings who might be ourselves under other circumstances."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and three for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. The first two deal with Nazi Germany: The War’s Not Over Yet is just out as a Kindle e-book and is set at the time of the Russian blockade of Berlin in 1948. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany.

My grandfather fought in Ukraine, though only up till 1943, but unlike the fictional grandfather here, my Opa never spoke to me or to my brother about his experiences (or anything he might have perpetrated). In fact, since he was an officer, his experience would have been different from those of the ordinary Landser, or squaddies. But when I read Alexander Starritt’s description of those men, some of them only lads, ‘fleeing on foot, broken, bedraggled, our tanks blown up, our artillery abandoned, our good name blackened for generations, our friends and brothers-in-arms buried in hostile soil', I did remember my mother’s description of my grandfather returning from the Front, haggard, unshaven, dressed in rags, drinking morosely in the kitchen. I also remember watching Gone with the Wind, when the movie showed the shattered Confederate army limping back, and my mother whispered to me: ‘That’s what our soldiers looked like when I saw them retreating.’ By the time she saw that, the soldiers had been beaten back to Graz, with the Russians hard on their heels. All the same. Not only defeated, but on the wrong side of history.

Meissner, the protagonist of We Germans, is one of a group of soldiers who are authorised by their captain to go hunting for a ‘food depot’ which, it’s rumoured, is about to be abandoned to the enemy. They don’t even half believe in its existence, but by now (1944) supplies aren’t getting to them and the ordinary soldiers, at least, are starving. Some of them are shooting themselves, or just wandering out to let the Russians kill them. The survivors will do anything if they think it might just fill their bellies.

What the soldiers first happen on, though, are the inhabitants of an entire village who have been strung up on ‘a single big tree ... in bunches, like swollen plums.’ Too hardened by the war, by the things they have seen and done, the soldiers leave them there, foraging onwards, arguing with each other and threatening each other, till they find an empty champagne bottle, Bollinger. That gets them on the scent. They follow a trail of empty bottles till they find a hunting lodge guarded by the much hated, brutal military police (hated because they’re brutal to their own side), Feldgendarmerie. At this point, Meissner tells us, ‘the desperate animal part of me barged any more complex sentiment out of the way. We stormed the compound just as we would have a Russian outpost.’ The soldiers kill most of the policemen. When they get inside, they find two frightened and teary Polish prostitutes. This novel is definitely not one for the squeamish, but the soldiers are more interested in food than in rape, and the Polish girls get away.

Meissner and his comrades (if that word is appropriate) help themselves to unimagined riches; ‘Italian sardines, French cheese, rollmops.. tinned peaches from Greece, sacks and sacks of firm, hale potatoes,’ also cigarettes and ‘fancy drinks.’ Finally, they torch the hunting lodge and leave it, having committed murder and treason. Yet the line they have crossed has given them ‘the taste of a certain destructive freedom.’ They escape out into the countryside, get huge quantities of the food down themselves, get the squitters because it’s too rich, torment each other.

Brutal and licentious soldiery, indeed. Meissner does have some human feeling left, but it’s too ‘deeply buried.’ Or driven out by the nagging misery of foot-rot, by, confusion, a vicious irritability, by fears for family at home, fear of death or capture, by, in Meissner’s case, a dogged determination to survive.

And yet these disaffected soldiers manage to seize a Russian tank and drive it towards the enemy, knocking out a great many tanks as they go. The story might end with their deaths, but they then get out of the tank and escape into the forest once more.

All this is portrayed with consummate and convincing skill; the reader is drawn into the ghastly reality of the soldiers’ existence, and the great strength of this part of the novel is that it makes the soldiers, and particularly Meissner, real people. Not monsters, but human beings who might be ourselves under other circumstances. Hunger does dreadful things to us; makes us more inclined to violence, sharpens the survival instinct to a lethal extent.

So far, so convincing. However, this is a novel of layers, and there are other layers which are less accomplished. Meissner’s narrative is a written document he leaves for his grandson, Callum, to read after his death, and it is heavily mediated. We have Meissner’s story from 1944, and then, like voiceovers, the older Meissner, and Callum speak to us; my reaction to those voices often veered from irritation to indignation.

I did at first wonder if what I was reading was the well-worn (in my youth) myth of the ordinary ‘Landser’ or squaddie, who fought a largely decent war, while police regiments and SS committed the atrocities. Then I thought, no, it’s not this kind of story. On the surface, Meissner is brutally honest; he describes how he and his fellow soldiers went ‘foraging,’ which meant stealing food from civilians, who were going to starve, but then you read: ‘What I want to tell you isn’t about atrocities or genocide’. Yet there is an episode where the soldiers come upon more Feldgendarmen and men from a ‘penal battallion’ (composed of convicted criminals), who are hanging German deserters, raping Polish housemaids and crucifying them and Polish labourers against the sides of a barn. So what, exactly, is Meissner’s definition of an atrocity? To be fair, he is quite clear that by merely fighting as a conscript he was complicit in the whole thing, but we know now that ordinary soldiers did murder civilians, incluidng Jews. Not Meissner, apparently.

Meissner also claims that the story is really about courage. Does he mean the naked instinct to survive (if so, are the others, who gave up, cowards?) or is it only about the capture of the tank? The tank capture actually prevents the Russians getting to the atrocities against the Poles and perhaps rescuing the victims before they died.

‘Did we do wrong?’ Meissner reflects. ‘By the morality of consequences, yes, undoubtedly. But it’s hard for me to accept that so baldly, because by the morality of virtues, of character, the others at least were brave and loyal.’

The elephant in the room here is that warfare is actually about killing people (though the expression ‘killing for your country’ is never used.) Nowadays it’s always justified in terms of some future good; the Russians, right now, are freeing Ukraine from ‘Nazis’, or so Putin tells us. We still feel that World War 2 was largely a just war, because it defeated Nazism (though it failed to protect the territorial integrity of Poland, which was where it started). In the post-war moral system, admittedly flawed, that Meissner is supposed to adhere to now, the morality of consequences is what it’s all about. What I would see in the tank capture is a kind of resetting of psychological equilibrium: the soldiers compensate for the treason they have committed. Or else they are simply doing what they have been programmed, by years of training and propaganda, to do.

Meissner does make one very valuable observation, a conclusion I came to myself after years of reading about Nazi Germany and thinking it through: ‘Only a very few of us were stronger than our times. Not me. A handful who somehow knew how to act beyond themselves, even then.’ Look at our own society. How many people dare blow the whistle on their employers, no matter what those employers do? He also writes: ‘I think that we were blemished by the consequences of what other people decided. No one ever has complete responsibility for his own moral balance. And the unforgiving truth, the severe, ancient truth, is that you can be culpable for something that you weren’t in control of.’

As one who has looked back at her own grandfather and wondered how he could live after participating in that war, and being part of that machinery, I have had similar thoughts. I cannot be indignant about the horrors of his internment after the end of the war, even though the investigators found nothing to convict him of in the end. He began by hating the Nazis; I do know that after the war he hated them, yet he became part of the machinery, to survive. To me, not the least crime of Nazis great and small is that the society they created made criminals of so many others. But I did feel that it might have been possible to get this view across through the narrative (indeed, I have passed quite a few moments, when walking the dog or dealing with mundane household tasks, working out how it could be done). I also wondered how far the opinions I heard were Starritt’s, rather than those of his characters.

Some of the interventions in the story are frankly off-beam, and why does Callum have to end an exposition of the myth of Ragnarok by sniping that dedicated recyclers are driven by an ‘end-of-days fixation’ which is a ‘narrow, atavistic niche in German culture, brought out by the extreme despair of losing two world wars’? It is news to me that recycling is a purely German concern. But what made me indignant (not to mention furious) was the attitude (whether Starritt’s or Meissner’s) towards the atrocities the Russians in their turn committed when they conquered Germany.

‘We were in the wrong,’ Starritt has Meissner write. ‘We had that knowledge hammered into us with the deaths of friends and the rape of our families. And the enormity of our crime meant we had to accept that the punishment, though terrible, was not unjust.’ Leaving aside the fact that the Russians also raped Polish and Yugoslav women (and what were they punished for?) what that boils down to is that the rape of women, girls and even young children and babies was a matter between men; the German army, the Red Army. Women, then, are property, what’s done to them is primarily an act of retribution against the males who own them?

But if there is ‘no fair, except what people effortfully construct’, as Starritt has Meissner tell us, then we need absolute clarity about what is just and what is not. What happened in Germany and Austria in 1945 was certainly the consequence of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941; it doesn’t follow that it is right for a child to wake up and find a Russian soldier on top of her. ‘And then,’ (the adult woman, speaking on a video I once watched, shuddered) ‘the next one came, and the next one, and the next one-’

Imagine what that was like, if you can bear to, and see if you can comfortably talk about justice.

We Germans is published by John Murray.

The War's Not Over Yet is available from Amazon Kindle.