Heinrich Böll Book order

'Böll's novel blows a stent in the human heart. . . It feels more necessary than ever.' Anna Funder, from the introduction 'This is the best book I have read this year; not by miles, but by whole astronomical units; I am stunned by it as if by a blow. It is *astonishing* to the extent that I cannot convey to you its power' Sarah Perry, bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth Twenty-four-year-old Andreas, a disillusioned German soldier, is travelling on a troop train to the Eastern Front when he has an awful premonition that he will die in exactly five days. As he hurtles towards his death, he reflects on the chaos around him - the naïve soldiers, the painfully thin girl who pours his coffee, the ruined countryside - with sudden, heart-breaking poignancy. Arriving in Poland the night before he is certain he will die, he meets Olina, a beautiful prostitute, and together they attempt to escape his fate... 'His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection' Daily Telegraph 'Boll combines a mammoth intelligence with a literary outlook that is masterful and unique' Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 'My most-admired contemporary novelist' John Ashbery 'From the moment I stepped on board the troop train with Private Andreas, concerns pertaining to my own world fell away completely. Holding this impelling book is tantamount to holding the young soldier's fate in one's hands. It is impossible to let go.' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll's powerful novel about a woman terrorized by the media A Penguin Classic In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has taken on heightened relevance. A young woman's association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare. Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Originally published: Bornheim [Germany]: Lamuv Verlag, 1981.

First published in 1953, And Never Said a Word is one of Heinrich Böll's finest novels. He explores the extremities of marriage with depth and compassion. Böll evokes an entire emotional world in the space of a day and a half, as husband and wife alternately relate this story of love and isolation, poverty and injustice. Weakness, as well as strength, provides the subtle emotional threads that weave the bonds of their love; married life, they discover, takes a far greater toll on all those who truly love than on those whose hearts are empty. Böll writes with a moral resonance that extracts significance from the most commonplace lives.

As West German society increasingly took on a gloss of economic well-being, Boll's trenchant novesl cut through the sleek outward show to reveal festering fears and suppurating physic states excluding poison into the system. WOMEN IN A RIVER LANDSCAPE brings this process to a fierce, fince culmination. . . Boll brings a humane understanding as well as indignation to the predicament of characters who seem not only rainted culprits but also victims of history SUNDAY TIMES.

These stories by the Nobel prizewinning German author were written between 1946 and 1952, but not published in Germany until 1983. They are short but bitterly exact sketches of the daily lives of Germans during World War II and its aftermath.

FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE Katharina Blum is pretty, bright, hard-working and at the centre of a big city scandal when she falls in love with a young radical on the run from the police. Portrayed by the city's leading newspaper as a whore, a communist and an atheist, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and sexual threats. Blum's life is systematically undone by the distortions of a corrupt press, concerned only with presenting the most salacious story. This is a chilling and unforgettable novel from a Nobel Prize-winning writer.

Hitler's once great army is broken and demoralized, the end of the war is imminent--but still soldiers are rounded up like criminals and sent to the front, Jews are 'evacuated, ' guns are fired, shells explode. In this novel Boll paints war as a series of idiocies, senseless accidents, and bizarre coincidences related only through death.

English, German (translation)