From the writer and director of I’ve Loved You So Long, the acclaimed film starring Kristin Scott Thomas, comes a novel hailed as “a modern masterpiece” (The Daily Telegraph), “full of terror, horror, and beauty and wonder” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Forced into a brutal concentration camp during a great war, Brodeck returns to his village at the war’s end and takes up his old job of writing reports for a governmental bureau. One day a stranger comes to live in the village whose odd manner arouses suspicions. When he is murdered by the villagers, the authorities who witnessed the killing tell Brodeck to write a report that is essentially a whitewash of the incident. As Brodeck writes the official account, he sets down his version of the truth in a separate, parallel narrative. In measured, evocative prose, he weaves into the story of the stranger his own painful history and the dark secrets the villagers have vigilantly kept hidden.
Set in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck.
See the rave reviews in The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph, and read an excerpt. Also, be sure to check out our Reader’s Guide.