The undertaking
By: Audrey Magee
Edition: Large print edition.
Publisher: W F Howes Ltd
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Rearsby
Language: eng
Number of pages: 359
ISBN-13: 9781471258374
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945; Fiction
Description: An immensely powerful first novel set in Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, its ambition and achievement reminiscent of Rachel Seiffert's 'The Dark Room', Hans Fallada's 'Alone in Berlin', and Helen Dunmore's 'The Siege'. Desperate to escape the Eastern front, Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met; it is a marriage of convenience that promises honeymoon leave for him and a pension for her should he die on the front. When Peter visits his new wife in Berlin, both are surprised by the attraction that develops between them. When Peter returns to the horrors of the front, it is only the dream of his wife that sustains him as he approaches Stalingrad. Back in Berlin, Katharina, goaded on by her desperate and delusional parents, ruthlessly works her way into the Nazi party hierarchy, wedding herself, her young husband and their unborn child to the regime. But when the tide of war turns and Berlin falls, Peter and Katharina, ordinary people stained with their small share of extraordinary guilt, find their simple dream of family increasingly hard to hold on to.
Notes: Standard print edition originally published: London: Atlantic Books, 2014.