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The Undertaking

The Undertaking

by Audrey Magee
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/02/2014

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$29.99

The photograph of the woman is tied to a fencepost; the army chaplain hovers nearby.

Peter Faber, a German soldier on the Russian front, is pledging his life to the stranger in the picture, while thousands of miles away in Berlin, the stranger is pledging the same to a photograph of him. Having never met, Peter and Katharina are getting married, a contract of business rather than of love - he earns ten days respite from the war for his 'honeymoon' while she is promised a widow's pension if he dies.

Travelling to meet Katharina, Peter is surprised to find that he is attracted to his new wife; in only ten days the two strangers fall in love and commit themselves to a future together living under the bright promises of Nazism.

However, when Peter rejoins his unit in Russia, the bitter winter rapidly chills the heat of his politics. As his comrades begin to die - by the cold, by the thump of falling bombs and by Russian knives - he loses sight of why Berlin has sent so many young men to their deaths in the snow drifts outside Stalingrad. Meanwhile, goaded on by her desperate and self-delusional parents, Katherina is ruthlessly working her way up the Nazi Party hierarchy, wedding herself and her young husband to a regime that will bury them if it ever falls...

A stunning, riveting portrayal of ordinary people trapped by extraordinary circumstances, and the price they will have to pay for their survival. In the tradition of Bernard Schlink's The Reader and Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room, The Undertaking shines an intense light on history and illuminates the lives of those caught up in one of its darkest chapters.

ISBN:
9781743316528
9781743316528
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-02-2014
Publisher:
ALLEN & UNWIN
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
304
Dimensions (mm):
234x153x22mm
Weight:
0.41kg
Audrey Magee

Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow. Her first novel, The Undertaking, was short-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction, for France's Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The Undertaking has been translated into ten languages and is being adapted for film.

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