© Fazi Editore, 2009
After many listless years spent in search for (or on the run from) his identity, musician Gregor Liedmann, now in his sixties, joins the ranks of his family and friends in the apple harvest on a farm in Eastern Germany. Laden with portentous symbols, the farm itself has witnessed occupation and destruction during the Second World War, the ensuing dispossession of the owners by the GDR, and the return of the rightful heirs and their children after reunification. It now serves as the suitable setting for the unravelling of Gregor's past and his reconciliation with his own son, who is about to leave for Sudan to work with victims of war and displacement. Gradually, the narrative unveils the protagonist's elaborate disguise, that is the assumed identity of a Jewish survivor, adopted to replace a dead German boy of the same age at the end of the Second Word War.
Hamilton's latest novel is a tour de force through Germany's changing self-image over the past six decades - it begins in the rubble of a destroyed Berlin and takes to the road with along with the hundreds of thousands of refugees at the end of the Second World War; it depicts the repression of the traumatic war experience and shame in post-war German society and shows the excesses of the of the counter-reaction initiated by the angry generation of '68ers; finally, it follows this generation's " long march through society's institutions" and arrives with them back in Berlin, in autumn 2006, where the air is still tingling with the euphoria and new-found patriotism induced by the FIFA World Cup.
Fourth Estate 2008
Translated into: Dutch, French, Italian
Peter Straus
Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.
20 Powis Mews
London W11 1JN
United Kingdom
Email: peters@rcwlitagency.co.uk
Website: www.rcwlitagency.co.uk