All That I Am
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Miles Franklin Literary Award
Winner, ABIA Book of the Year and Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Winner, Barbara Jefferis Award
Winner, Independent Bookseller Award for Best Debut Fiction and Indie Book of the Year
Shortlisted, Prime Minister ’s literary award for fiction
Shortlisted , Western Australian Premier's Award for Fiction
Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of her past—and a part of history that has been all but forgotten.
Another lifetime away, it’s 1939 and the world is going to war. Ernst Toller, self-doubting revolutionary and poet, sits in a New York hotel room, settling up the account of his life.
When Toller’s story arrives on Ruth’s doorstep, their shared past slips under her defences, and she’s right back among them—those friends who predicted the brutality of the Nazis and gave everything they had to stop them. Those who were tested—and in some cases found wanting—in the face of hatred, of art, of love and of history.
Based on real people and events, All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Funder follows the success of Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall with a debut novel "reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast." Ruth Becker glimpses that beast outside her Berlin apartment in 1933, as her showy journalist husband, Hans, makes mojitos on the day that Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The heart of the novel, however, belongs to Ruth's cousin Dora Fabian, leftist agitator, doomed idealist, and soul mate of playwright Ernst Toller. Ruth helps Dora hide Ernst's writings as the Reichstag burns, and she flees with Hans the next day after being questioned about her Communist affiliations. Outside Germany, she works tirelessly for the cause, bringing Nazi preparations for war to the attention of the British. But her relationship with Hans, whose secret activities endanger everyone, crumbles. As the Holocaust begins, Ernst, in New York, relates Dora's role in his life to a typist whose document reaches Ruth in Australia almost 60 years later. By alternating between Ernst and Ruth, Funder leaps through time with alacrity. She adds an integral perspective on a shopworn subject by invoking the lives of Nazi dissidents whose attempts to alert the world to the growing menace were ignored until it was too late.
