Norbert Gstrein Book order

A poignant novel of political-religious awakening by one of Germany's literary stars An anonymous phone call, an unattended bag discovered in the station of a small Austrian town, a piece of paper saying, "Repent!" and "Next time it will be for real!" A C.C.T.V. image of a young man. What was it that made the teacher think it was his old student, Daniel? Ten years earlier Daniel had spent time with the teacher in his remote house by the river. The town had talked. Anton had recently returned from two years teaching in Istanbul - he was unsettled, subversive, solitary. Daniel was on the brink of adulthood - idealistic, unrequitedly in love with Judith, vulnerable to influence. Those summer weeks by the river were an idyll. But did they also sow the seeds of Daniel's later obsessiveness, his biblical attitudes, his political dogmatism? As the bomb threat excites the community with all the tension of a witch hunt, and Anton himself becomes a focus for suspicion and gossip, he anatomises his memories of the preceding decade. What went wrong for Daniel, and could he have stopped it?

As ethnic tensions escalate into war, Marija returns in confusion to her native Croatia - call it a mid-life crisis. She soon takes up with a young soldier, but her age does not give her the least power over him. On the other side of the world, her estranged father is gearing up to enter the fray, raising the cash to raise an army. Exiled to Argentina, he has been waiting for this moment since 1945. But war is a young man's game, and even his closest comrades cannot be trusted. If the Old Man is to meet his daughter again it will be in a world altered beyond his understanding, where the only soldiers he commands are in his head.

Hirschfelder fled Vienna shortly before the war. From London he was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. The friends he made there would change his life forever.

This novel describes from varying perspectives the lives of two Austrian brothers. Moritz and Vinzenz, who meet again after a long estrangement. They remember shared and individual experiences, prompted by questions from their sister, photographs in family albums, and encounters with current reality during a visit to their home town. The memories that form most of the novel's substance highlight the fundamental problems of their development and the reasons for their successes and failures in sibling rivalries, conflicts between them and their father; inability and unwillingness to identify with their Austrian heritage; missed opportunities, breakdowns in communication, failed relationships with other people; guilt incurred through betrayal of their girlfriend Magda and each other.