Library for the War-Wounded

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Library for the War-Wounded by Monika Helfer, read by Kristin Atherton.

From Monika Helfer’s award-winning, internationally bestselling wartime trilogy, based on her own family. Translated into English for the first time.

‘We called him Vati, Dad. Not Father, not Papa. That’s what he wanted. He thought it sounded modern. He wanted to present himself to us, and through us, as a man in tune with the modern age. Though he seemed to come from nowhere.’

Josef was an illegitimate child, a charity case from Salzburg, schooled by a benefactor. He was drafted to fight in the Second World War while still at school and sent to Russia, returning with only one leg. He married his nurse, and brought his family to the high, idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps, where he took a position as manager of a home for injured soldiers, a strangely suspended, deeply isolated place with a remarkable library.

He was a man of many mysteries. To his daughter, Monika, none was greater than his obsession with these cloistered, crumbling books, his great treasure and secret amidst a country barrelling away from the memory of war.

Beautifully written, restrained, and memorable, Library for the War-Wounded turns a real life into great literature by confronting the universal question: Who are our parents, really?

Critics Review

Beautifully rendered in English by Davidson, Helfer's novel stirringly blurs the line between memoir and fiction, concluding with painful honesty, confiding her doubts about how well she knew her father. Fans of family sagas will appreciate Helfer’s multifaceted tribute to the father who inspired her love of reading
Booklist
Helfer's introspective remembrances of her childhood, complete with anecdotal narratives of her relatives and glimpses of the love shared by her parents, breathe life into the characters' simple moments of joy amid times of hardship. Helfer's fans will appreciate her searching perspective on her father
Publishers Weekly
A clear portrait of the unrelenting, continuing legacy of damage suffered by those permanently maimed by war . . . Deciphering the forces that informed her father's decisions, as well as his various disabilities, leads Helfer to examine their generalized effects on her family as well in this sobering account. Helfer's unrelieved portrait of a suffering soul wastes nothing on superfluous embellishment
Kirkus Reviews

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