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A personal and panoramic new history of Germany in the twentieth century by the Sunday Times bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2015

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2016

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
´A passionate memoir.´ Neil MacGregor´A superb portrait of twentieth century Germany seen through the prism of a house which was lived in, and lost, by five different families. A remarkable book.´ Tom Holland
´Personal and panoramic, heart-wrenching yet uplifting, this is history at its most alive.´ A.D. Miller

In 2013, Thomas Harding returned to his grandmother´s house on the outskirts of Berlin which she had been forced to leave when the Nazis swept to power. What was once her ´soul place´ now stood empty and derelict. A concrete footpath cut through the garden, marking where the Berlin Wall had stood for nearly three decades.

In a bid to save the house from demolition, Thomas began to unearth the history of the five families who had lived there: a nobleman farmer, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned Nazi composer, a widow and her children and a Stasi informant. Discovering stories of domestic joy and contentment, of terrible grief and tragedy, and of a hatred handed down through the generations, a history of twentieth century Germany and the story of a nation emerged.

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Thomas Harding is an author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, among other publications. He co-founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning documentary maker. He also ran a local newspaper in West Virginia, winning the West Virginia Association of Justice´s Journalist of the Year Award, before moving back to England in 2011, where he now lives with his family. He is the author of Hanns and Rudolf, a Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the JQ-Wingate Prize; the internationally acclaimed Kadian Journal: A Father´s Story; The House by the Lake, a Costa Biography Award and Orwell Prize nominee; and Blood on the Page, winner of the 2018 Golden Dagger Award for Non-Fiction.

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