
If you enjoyed Schlink's Homecoming...
...here two more novels that deal with the conflicts of wartime...
The Visible World by Mark Slouka
A doomed romance full of feeling and fervour that plays itself out in the heat of the Nazi occupation of Prague and then smoulders in the embers for decades before flaring into life again, thousands of miles away, with incendiary effects.
This is a story about memory and concealed histories, and about the way that the most fiercely-held secrets of the past eventually force their way to the surface. It begins with a boy, the child of Czech immigrants to the US, who is brought up hearing the ancient myths, and the folktales of his parents' homeland. As he grows older, he becomes aware that the one story he hasn't been told is what his parents did during the war. It is only as an adult, when he makes a journey back to Czechoslovakia, that he discovers their part in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious 'butcher of Prague'.
Embedded at the heart of this gripping history is a powerful love story - of a tragic passion and an enduring commitment. Plotted with all the intensity of a thriller, The Visible World is immediately involving, and a novel to delight on every level - intellectual, literary and emotional
The Dark Room by Rachel Sieffert
The Dark Room is a careful study of three Germans affected by the Second World War: Helmut the young photographer with the deformed arm; Lore the 12-year-old who manages to get her refugee siblings to Hamburg in 1945; and Micha the young teacher who pursues the truth about his grandfather's war years 50 years later.
It is the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young photographer in Berlin in the 1930s who uses his craft to express his patriotic fervour; Lore, a twelve-year-old girl who in 1945 guides her young siblings across a devastated Germany after her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies; and, fifty years later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his loving grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.





