I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This is a vivid and gripping true account of how a brilliant Polish Jewish pianist survived by a fluke the Nazi mass-murder of Warsaw’s Jews in which his parents and three siblings died. The author hid in the ruins of Warsaw through two winters without heating and eating only scraps of food he managed to scavenge. Near death, he was, almost unbelievably, found and helped by a German SS officer who had heard him playing a battered piano.
The book shows humanity at both its worst and its best. The film by Roman Polanski is brilliant, but this memoir is even more powerful.
The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and Oscar-winning film.
'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday
'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer
This novel shocked and even horrified me at first with its graphic description of a woman’s sexual fantasies. What has this to do with the horrors that are to follow? What is the relevance to the Holocaust of Freud’s attempt to treat this disturbed woman? The novel created huge controversy on its publication, and it took me several readings to understand what the author was suggesting–at least, what I think he meant because nothing is spelled out for the reader.
This is the heartbreaking story of a young woman and her small son caught up in the horror of what the Nazis did in Ukraine, and what I think D. M. Thomas is doing in the most inventive and daring manner is to show how deeply embedded in the psyche of Europe is the wickedness, the psychological sickness, that led to the Holocaust. I’m usually uneasy with the supernatural in fiction, but this novel ends with a vision of imagined survival after or in spite of the suffering that had me in tears.
The worldwide bestselling, Booker-shortlisted modern classic
Now a BBC radio play starring Anne-Marie Duff and Bill Paterson, dramatised by Dennis Potter.
'Spine-tingling... heart-stunning' New York Times
'A novel of blazing imaginative and intellectual force' Salman Rushdie
'This novel is a reminder that fiction can amaze' Time
'Precise, troubling, brilliant' Observer
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The White Hotel is a modern classic of searing eroticism and sensuality set against the broad sweep of twentieth-century history.
It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
I can’t understand why this book isn’t better known. It is an actual diary that survived by chance. It was written by a young woman of twenty-one from a wealthy Jewish family long-established in France and not thinking of themselves as anything but French. I found it gripping and harrowing, all the more so because when the Nazis conquer France and start to impose restrictions on Jews, Hélène cannot grasp what is happening or what lies ahead. She has had a happy, secure life, but now these hideous indignities are being imposed on her.
When she is forced to wear the yellow star, she is horrified by the jeers and insults directed at her in the streets by passers-by whom she has always thought of as fellow citizens. The diary brings home, like almost nothing else I’ve read, the way in which the ordinary life of the intended victims turned inexorably into a daily nightmare of anxiety and then terror.
I found the final section almost unbearably painful. Gradually, she realizes that worse things lie ahead, and when she understands what her fate and that of her whole family is to be, the diary stops being addressed to herself. She writes directly to anyone who might find it after what she now rightly knows is her imminent death.
Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.
On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about…
This powerful story angered many when it was published, but Styron is asking serious questions: How do you survive a terrible experience, especially one that forces you to make an agonizing choice? Can you, in fact, survive that? He takes what I believe is the most extreme case of survivor guilt imaginable, which is the heart-rending decision that Sophie is forced to make and which is the core of the novel.
That’s in the past–the recent past for the characters–and in the present, the three main people in the novel find themselves in a painful love triangle that arises specifically from those terrible events but which I found to be a very perceptive insight into a situation that many of us find ourselves in.
It’s about a different kind of choice but one which will cause pain, whatever is decided.
In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant. Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past: her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice.
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
If there is any light to be found in the horror of what happened in Eastern Europe under the Nazis, it is in stories like these. The novel is very closely based on real events in which a German businessman takes a risk by employing and then protecting a large number of Jews.
What I think is so good about it is that it doesn’t sentimentalize or over-simplify what happened. You want to identify with Schindler, the heroic German, but he’s far from saintly. And not all the people he rescues are wholly admirable, either. I found the novel unputdownable, and the suspense isn’t gratuitously stuck on to make the story more exciting.
It’s one of the few fictions about that horror that manages to create a suspenseful narrative without making you feel guilty for enjoying it, and that’s because you know that the frightening twists and turns of the narrative are pretty much what actually occurred.
The basis for the Oscar-winning Spielberg movie, this novel recreates the story of Oskar Schindler, an Aryan who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
It is the Second World War. When an Eastern European country is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a middle-class man, motivated by a mixture of generosity and something less admirable, persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl from a different community who is at school with their younger daughter. He assumes that the arrangement will be temporary and that he will gain material advantages through it. However, days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy’s hatred of the girl’s community leads to the gradual but pitiless exclusion and then persecution of all members of it and of anyone trying to help them.
The man finds he has put himself and his family in danger. Gradually the girl turns into a hated prisoner whose presence imperils her hosts. The wife’s mental fragility becomes increasingly apparent while the girl is gradually revealed to have her own demons. Her disruptive presence opens underlying rifts within the family as the man’s two daughters come to resent the girl more and more bitterly. None of their neighbours - nor even their friends and relatives – can be trusted not to betray their dangerous secret.
As the growing threat from outside puts an intolerable strain on the family, the man eventually finds himself confronted with a terrible choice.
