To Die in Spring
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the HWA Sharpe Gold Crown for Best Historical Novel.
An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel of a friendship tragically interrupted by war, by German author Ralf Rothmann.
Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances.
In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy.
'To Die in Spring holds its own against Günter Grass and Erich Maria Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership' – Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This brilliant novel from German author Rothmann (Knife Edge) follows Walter Urban and his close friend Friedrich, two adolescent dairy farm workers in northern Germany, during the waning months of World War II. While out drinking at a local beer hall, they were coerced into enlisting in the German army by SS officers. The unnamed narrator, Walter's son, pieces together his father's wartime experience in the present day, after Walter's death, by constructing the few factual details available to him into a vivid narrative that reveals the horrors of war and a traumatic event that changed Walter's life. Spare and elegant, the novel paints a quietly harrowing picture of the lasting effects of human violence and offers brief, poignant glimpses into the natural world (especially when members of the animal kingdom wander unknowingly into the war zone). Directly confronting issues of responsibility, accountability, and legacy, this is an undeniably powerful work.
