Library for the War-Wounded
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
The internationally bestselling novel-a daughter's portrait of her WWII veteran father, assembled from shards of memory.
We called him Vati, Dad. Not Papa. He thought it sounded modern. He wanted to present himself to us, and through us, as a man in tune with the modern age. A man who could be read as having a different past.
Inspired by the author's family history, Library for the War-Wounded transports readers to the aftermath of World War II, uncovering the life of Helfer's father, Josef. Born with the stigma of illegitimacy, he found solace in books, and his education was eventually funded by the Catholic Church. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he witnessed the horrors of the Eastern Front and returned from the war an amputee. He married his nurse and brought his family to the high, idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps, where he took a position as manager of a convalescent home for war-wounded.
Josef was a man of many mysteries. To his daughter Monika, none was greater than his obsession with the home's unlikely and remarkable library, his great treasure and comfort as the country barrels away from the memory of war. He will stop at nothing to save it-even when it tears apart his family.
Beautifully restrained and compressed, Library for the War-Wounded turns lived experience into great literature by confronting the universal question: Can we ever truly know our parents?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Helfer's touching second installment in a trilogy inspired by her family history (after Last House Before the Mountain) focuses on her WWII veteran father and his passion for books. Josef Helfer is conscripted straight out of finishing school into the German army near the end of the war. After he loses a leg due to frostbite, he marries his nurse, Grete. The couple settle in the Austrian mountains and raise four children. Monika, the second-oldest, narrates. As a young girl, Monika doesn't understand Josef's dedication to the extensive library he's established in the Convalescent Home for the War-wounded, which he manages and where his family lives. After an official from the association that owns the home tells Josef that it will be remodeled and the library converted into two rooms for lodging, Josef fears losing his books. He removes the most valued volumes and hides them, thus risking his job and the family's stability. Helfer's introspective remembrances of her childhood, complete with anecdotal narratives of her relatives and glimpses of the love shared by her parents, breathe life into the characters' simple moments of joy amid times of hardship. Helfer's fans will appreciate her searching perspective on her father.
