'A truly great book ... an utterly gripping thriller' Justin Cartwright, Sunday Telegraph
Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the
twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm
Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy
tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What
Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on
5 February 1947 in Berlin.
Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and a book
of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern
and contemporary authors. Penguin publish his translations of
Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories and Irmgard Keun's Child of
All Nations.
One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about
World War II. Ever.
*Alan Furst*
Terrific ... a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan
thriller.
*Irish Times*
A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada's scope is
extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is ... as morally powerful as
anything I've ever read.
*Telegraph*
The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the
Nazis.
*Primo Levi*
Fallada assembles a cast of vivid low-life characters, stoolies,
thieves and whores
*Guardian*
Visceral, chilling ... has the suspense of a Le Carré novel
*New Yorker*
A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada's scope is
extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is ... as morally powerful as
anything I've ever read
*Telegraph*
First published in Germany in 1947 and evoking the horror of life
in Germany in the Second World War. A rediscovered masterpiece that
makes you want to seek out more works by this great chronicler of
events in my own lifetime.
*Barry Humphries, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph*
The other fictional high point of 2009 was Alone in Berlin ... Hans
Fallada's 1947 portrait of an ordinary German couple stung into a
life of protest by the death of their soldier son is harrowing and
masterly.
*Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph*
[This novel] suggests that resistance to evil is rarely
straightforward, mostly futile, and generally doomed. Yet to the
novel's aching, unanswered question: 'Does it matter?' there is in
this strange and compelling story to be found a reply in the
affirmative. Primo Levi had it right: This is the great novel of
German resistance.
*Richard Flanagan*
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