To Die in Spring - Hardcover

Rothmann, Ralf

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1509812857 ISBN 13: 9781509812851

Publisher: Picador, 2017

Synopsis

Winner of the HWA Sharpe Gold Crown for Best Historical Novel 2018

'[To Die in Spring] holds its own against [Günter] Grass and [Erich Maria] Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership.' Guardian

Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances.

In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy.

An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel by German author Ralf Rothmann.

About this title

About the Authors

Ralf Rothmann is a German novelist, poet, and dramatist. To Die in Spring, his eighth novel, but the first to be published in the UK.

Shaun Whiteside has translated over fifty books from German, French, Italian and Dutch, including novels by Amélie Nothomb, Luther Blissett, Wu Ming and Marcel Möring. His translations of Freud, Musil, Schnitzler and Nietzsche are published by Penguin Classics. His translation of the novel Magdalena the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger won the 1996 Schlegel-Tick Prize. His most recent translation from German is Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler. He lives in London.

Shaun Whiteside has translated over fifty books from German, French, Italian and Dutch, including novels by Amélie Nothomb, Luther Blissett, Wu Ming and Marcel Möring. His translations of Freud, Musil, Schnitzler and Nietzsche are published by Penguin Classics. His translation of the novel Magdalena the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger won the 1996 Schlegel-Tick Prize. His most recent translation from German is Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler. He lives in London.

From the Back Cover

Praise for To Die in Spring
‘In this masterpiece, Ralf Rothmann manages the seemingly impossible. He describes the guilt of their fathers from the viewpoint of the post-War generation without any descent into smug moralising’ Badische Zeitung (Germany)

‘Rothmann imagines characters, landscapes, dialogues with hallucinatory precision, sparing the reader no detail of brutality’ Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

‘To Die in Spring is not only a great novel of the Second World War, the silence of the war generation and the sadness that they passed on to their offspring, it is also a triumph of language’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)

‘The finest novel about the end of the Second World War in years, and an exquisite anti-war tale, of universal importance’ El País (Spain)

‘To Die in Spring is not only a beautiful novel about World War II, the silence of the fathers and the defeat they bequeathed to the next generation; it is also a triumph of language, of exquisite writing’ Avvenire (Italy)

‘Born in 1953, Ralf Rothmann is proof that you need not have lived through the war itself to write a great novel about it’ NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands)

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1509812857
• ISBN 13: 9781509812851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208