27th January 1945; the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Vistula-Oder Offensive. By then, more than a million people had been murdered there, and though most of the surviving prisoners were forced onto a death march by the retreating Nazis, about 7,000 had been left behind. The date is observed now as […]
Hailed as one of the most intense and thought-provoking reads in modern time, The Reader is a brilliant commentary on the generation that came after WW2. Growing up in the 1950s in the aftermath of the war, Bernhard Schlink articulates the emotions he and others like him went through, at a time when Germany was […]
There are some books that simply seize you, and the echoes of the words linger with you long after you have turned the last page; The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one such book. The very first time I read it, it left me with a lump in my throat for days, and every […]
As far as historic fiction goes, Mila 18 is for me THE definitive book in the genre. The story is based on a real-life incident (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943) and is the only book where I as a reader identify with not one but two characters, with both of them ideologically on opposing […]
War Crows 