Will I love The Glass Room?

Set in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, this story of a newly-married couple overseeing the construction of their dream home is as clean-cut, luminous and full of hints of fragility as the building itself – a modernist cube of glass. The husband is rich, the wife excited by her new role as patron. Their architect - a sharply observed portrayal of a tetchy artist who will insist on sticking to his vision regardless of his clients’ doubts – wants to make them a masterpiece, and he does. But the husband is Jewish. We are in the 1930s. Glass walls are not… show more.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this war novel is the fact that perhaps its most important character is the setting—the house or “glass room” where the main characters live. Viktor Landauer, a Jew, and his gentile wife Liesel, along with their modernist architect Rainer von Abt, build a house that they hope represents the vibrancy and faith in the future of a new and fresh world order in Europe, casting off the centuries of old-world class constraints. However, with the rise of Nazism, the house, ironically, becomes another Holocaust site used to oppress and kill Jews. Great characters… show more.