Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Novel by Heinrich Boll, first published in German asBillard um halbzehnin 1959. In its searing examination of the moral crises of postwar Germany, the novel resembles Boll's other fiction; its interior monologues and flashbacks, however, make it his most complex work.  The novel examines the lives of three generations of architects and their responses to the Nazi regime and its aftermath. The present-day action takes place on the 80th birthday of patriarch Heinrich Fahmel, who built St. Anthony's Abbey. At the end of World War II, his son Robert destroyed the abbey to protest the church's complicity with the Nazis; Robert's son, Joseph, is serving his apprenticeship by helping to restore St. Anthony's. All three characters confront their relationship to building and destruction, as well as their personal and historical past.  --The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature