The Kindly Ones

A Nazi recounts his unsettling journey through WWII in this prize-winning novel: "a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force" (Michael Korda, The Daily Beast).

A literary sensation when it was first published in France, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones was awarded both the Gran Prix du roman de l'Academie and the Prix Goncourt. Second World War historian Antony Beevor called it "a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come" Now it is available in a sparkling English language edition by the renowned translator Charlotte Mandell (The Times, UK)


A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.


Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.

"Simply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer." —Time