Anthea Bell

"The last novel by one of Germany's most important postwar writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before Walter Kempowski'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 1944-1945 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....

"Austerlitz is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left...

Raised by a harsh Jewish single mother who prioritizes her socialist party connections over her family in mid-twentieth-century East Berlin, Thomas is forced to abandon his dream of becoming a writer while his sister, Ella, becomes increasingly introverted.

"Occupied Berlin, American sector, 1945: Ben, a German boy retrieving cigarette butts to repackage and sell on the black market, discovers the body of a beautiful young woman in a subway station. Blonde and blue-eyed, she has been sexually assaulted and strangled with a chain. In the scramble to identify the body, the victim is mistaken for an American and a local investigation becomes a matter for the U.S. Military Police. Captain John Ashburner...

While on their way to Bremen, four aging animals who are no longer of any use to their masters find a new home after outwitting a gang of robbers.

These sixteen moving essays contain Sebald's trademark themes--the power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the existence of ghosts in both places and artifacts. Four essays pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present on the Mediterranean isle. In "A Little Excursion to Ajaccio," Sebald visits the birthplace of Napoleon and muses on the hints of a great man's future in his...

A memoir of brutality, heroism and personal discovery from Europe's dark heart, revealing one of the most extraordinary untold stories of the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, at Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border, not far from the front lines of the advancing Red Army, Countess Margit Batthyany gave a party in her mansion. The war was almost over, and the German aristocrats and SS officers dancing and drinking knew it was lost. Late...

After learning that humans are headed toward his hidden home, Firedrake, a silver dragon, is joined by a brownie and an orphan boy in a quest to find a legendary valley, known as the Rim of Heaven, while being pursued by an old enemy.