All That I Am
The tense and moving WW2 love story from the author of Stasiland and Wifedom
-
- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
FROM THE AUTHOR OF STASILAND & WIFEDOM
A powerful love story that tells the heroic and tragic true story of the German resistance in World War II that resonates deeply in today’s political climate.
When Hitler comes to power in 1933, a tight-knit group of friends and lovers become hunted outlaws overnight. United in their resistance to the madness and tyranny of Nazism, they must flee the country.
Dora, passionate and fearless, her lover, the great playwright Ernst Toller, her younger cousin Ruth and Ruth's husband Hans find refuge in London. Here they take breath-taking risks in order to continue their work in secret.
But England is not the safe haven they think it to be, and a single, chilling act of betrayal will tear them apart . . .
'Spellbinding . . . there are echoes of the best espionage tales' Sunday Telegraph
'A superb novel that transcends its setting. This book is a wonder. Do, please, read it' Spectator
'A story of courage and betrayal . . . she has captured the atmosphere of what it must have been like to have been at the centre of the left-wing movement in post-war Germany' Evening Standard
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.
