A moving, darkly funny road trip novel about World War II, returning to one's birthplace, and coming to terms with tragedy.West Germany, 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall: Jonathan Fabrizius, a middle-aged erstwhile journalist, has a comfortable existence in Hamburg, bankrolled by his furniture-manufacturing uncle. He lives with his girlfriend Ulla, who collects artistic representations of torture, in a grand, decrepit, pre-war house that just by chance escaped annihilation by the Allied bombers. One day Jonathan receives a package in the mail from the Santubara Company, a luxury car company commissioning him to travel in their newest V8 model through the People's Republic of Poland and to write about the route for a car rally. Little does the marketing department that came up with this PR trip to the east know that their choice location is Jonathan's birthplace: for Jonathan is a war orphan from former East Prussia whose mother breathed her last fleeing the...

An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view—dialogue, song, literary quotations, commercials, and political slogans—tell a different story.  Through this echo chamber of voices, Kempowski shows a hugely turbulent and murderously intolerant nation racing toward disaster. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadellöser & Wolff) and the best known of Kempowski's novels in Germany, An Ordinary Youth is now available in English for the first time.

A wealthy family tries—and fails—to seal themselves off from the chaos of post-World War II life surrounding them in this stunning novel by one of Germany's most important post-war writers.The last novel by one of Germany's most important post-war writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before the author's death. It describes with matter-of-fact clarity and acuity, and a roving point of view, the atmosphere in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-45, as the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army approaches. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into a state of disrepair. "Auntie" runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the Germany army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife Katharina and her bookish twelve-year-old son Peter. As the road beside the house fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof receives...