A New York Times Notable Book
A Times (London) Book of the Year
“Seiffert has unleashed literature’s unique power to analyze history’s scroll, to let fiction judge.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Seiffert packs a great deal into a small amount of space. Her prose style resembles a cello onstage played in the pitch dark. Sonorous and somber and yet what use it makes of just a few notes. . . . [She] is such a patient and poised storyteller that, even though history tells us otherwise, like all the characters in the book, we read toward its terrible climax believing—perhaps it will not happen.” —The Boston Globe
“Superb, delicately poised.” —Financial Times
“[Seiffert’s] spare, beautiful prose is a joy to read.” —The Guardian
“A close study of moral choice. . . . Most literature of the ‘third generation’ after the war explores the impact on its descendants. Ms Seiffert’s fictions are different: they inhabit the events themselves. Yet from all-too-familiar horror they swerve into the unexpected, into a new story—a gleam in the darkness that readers haven’t seen before.” —The Economist
“Seiffert’s writing is spare and atmospheric, perfectly paced to achieve the maximum effect of stillness yielding to panic, order giving way to violent disorder and, eventually, winter turning into spring.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Without wasting a word, Seiffert follows [her characters] with an implacable calm, although outrage lurks under the surface of every word.” —The Literary Review
“The primal energy in this novel is a moral sore that will never heal.” —John Sutherland, The Times (London)
“A tale of suspense, terror and flight, but also of existential dilemma, moral courage and endurance. . . . Some day it may rank as a classic of the Wild East.” —The Jewish Chronicle
“Completely captures those times in a vivid, precise, captivating and terrible way.” —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
“[An] accomplished literary work. . . . The novel truly shines in its offering of diverse, authentic perspectives.” —Booklist
“Seiffert is a master at creating tension and empathy in a novel that turns on the nuances of human behaviour.” —The Observer
“Spare, elegant and devastating.” —Psychologies magazine
“A fine novel that locates small, flickering lights of hope in an otherwise desolate landscape.” —The Sunday Times (London)
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