Alone in Berlin

One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever. – Alan FurstTerrific … a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller. * Irish Times *A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada’s scope is extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is … as morally powerful as anything I’ve ever read. – Charlotte Moore * Telegraph *The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis. – Primo LeviFallada assembles a cast of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores – James Buchan * Guardian *Visceral, chilling … has the suspense of a Le Carré novel * New Yorker *A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada’s scope is extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is … as morally powerful as anything I’ve ever read – Charlotte Moore * Telegraph *First published in Germany in 1947 and evoking the horror of life in Germany in the Second World War. A rediscovered masterpiece that makes you want to seek out more works by this great chronicler of events in my own lifetime. * Barry Humphries, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph *The other fictional high point of 2009 was Alone in Berlin … Hans Fallada’s 1947 portrait of an ordinary German couple stung into a life of protest by the death of their soldier son is harrowing and masterly. – David Robson * Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph *[This novel] suggests that resistance to evil is rarely straightforward, mostly futile, and generally doomed. Yet to the novel’s aching, unanswered question: ‘Does it matter?’ there is in this strange and compelling story to be found a reply in the affirmative. Primo Levi had it right: This is the great novel of German resistance. – Richard Flanagan

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern and contemporary authors.