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A sharply evocative novel of one man´s journey into his family history and the troubled legacy of World War II. From the author of All for Nothing

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Jonathan Fabricus is a journalist living in West Germany at the end of the 1980s. In 1988 - the year before the Berlin wall comes down - he is asked by a car manufacturer to travel to the contested lands of former East Prussia to write about the route for a car rally. It´s a plum job, but his interest is piqued too by his own connection to those lands. Fleeing the advancing Russians in 1945, his mother died in childbirth on the refugee route trail out of East Prussia and was buried in a village that under Allied victory was given over to what is now communist Poland. On this sometimes darkly comical and often dangerous road trip - where the Nazi legacy lives on in buildings and fortifications and violence is never far from the surface - Jonathan comes face to face with his painful family history, as well as devastating questions about ordinary Germans´ complicity and guilt in the war.

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Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) was one of Germany´s most important post-war writers. He is known for the acclaimed series of novels Deutsche Chronik (´German Chronicles´) and his immense, eight-volume collection of first-hand accounts of World War II, Das Echolot (´Echo Soundings´), the final volume of which, Swansong 1945, was published by Granta in 2014. His critically applauded last novel, Alles Umsonst (All for Nothing), was a bestseller in Germany in 2006, and in the UK in 2015, where it was published to rapturous reviews

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