Destination London: German-speaking Emigres and British Cinema, 1925-1950
Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli
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The legacy of emigres in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second...
The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
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The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity....
The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two's Unknown Tragedy
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The tragedies of World War II are well known. But at least one has been forgotten: in September...
A Sparrow in Terezin
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Bound together across time, two women will discover a powerful connection through one survivor's...
The Imposter
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The Impostor, by the admired Spanish writer Javier Cercas, is a true story that is nevertheless...
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
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In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it...
Those Who Are Loved
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'Victoria Hislop's view of history in her novels is, like the writer herself, a compassionate and...
Historical Fiction Modern Greek History
ClareR (5726 KP) rated Send For Me in Books
Sep 7, 2021
This was a different take on other books set at this time, and I liked that about it very much. I haven’t read many books about those who managed to escape the Nazi regime and immigrate to safe countries before the Holocaust really began. But it’s no less saddening for that. Annalise desperately misses her parents, and life is so utterly different in the US.
The story swaps between Annalise and her granddaughter, Clare, whose life couldn’t have been any more different. Clare has the much more liberated life of an American woman - whether that’s what she really wants, remains to be seen.
I really enjoyed seeing the juxtaposition between a 1930s immigrant and a modern young woman. Annalise’s fear of being in a big city with no English is palpable - I panicked along with her. It must be so scary to move somewhere that’s completely different to your own life experience, and not even have a common language - something that people have always had to endure for their own safety throughout the ages.
This is a really moving novel, made more so when I learnt that the letters between Annalise and her mother Klara were real - just that the names were changed.
Eyewitness to Wehrmacht Atrocities on the Eastern Front: A German Soldier’s Memoir of War and Captivity
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How can the truth about the devastating atrocities committed by the German army on the Eastern Front...
I also tend to find 'book club picks' to be rather off-putting; generally finding those I have previously read to be rather tedious and just not generally all that interesting (while able to admire the literary sophistication of the works).
This is both a crime fiction novel, and a 'Richard and Judy book club pick', so that would - normally - have been 2 marks against picking it up, in my books.
However, I have read - and generally quite enjoyed - most, if not all, of Simon Scarrow's other works - in particular his Cato and Macro series - so, when I saw this on a Kindle deal for something like 99p, I thought to myself 'why not?'.
And, I have to admit, I did actually quite enjoy this.
Set in 1939 Berlin just at the start of WW2, I found this to be unusual in that it told the story from the Point of View of a German criminal inspector - most WW2 novels (that I am aware of) usually feature either American or Brits as their main protagonists - who is not a member of the Nazi party: a fact that, here, is usually held against him but is also the reason he got handed the assignment as he has no links to any factions within the party.
It's both a very different time and 'headspace' than modern sensibilities; interesting to see how the man-on-the-street could have viewed the headline events of the time. As someone from Northern Ireland, there's also aspects of the novel that hit frighteningly close to home for me ...