Product Description
“You can’t prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel.” —John Irving, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The World According to Garp
“Exceptional, layered and compelling…This book moves like a freight train.” —Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of In Love
From the New York Times bestselling author John Boyne, a devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the sins of her own terrible past, and a present in which it is never too late for bravery
Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps.
Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can’t help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry’s beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence.
All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel’s girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past. Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief and remorse, she can choose to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before—whatever the cost to herself….
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of December 2022:John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the author of one of all my all-time favorite novels, The Heart’s Invisible Furies) returns to WWII in his latest page-turning novel, which we named one of the best books of 2022. What does it mean to be culpable? If you know something bad is happening is it your duty to stop it? What if you're just a child? Moving backward and forward in time, from Germany to Australia, Paris to a posh apartment in London, Gretel has spent the majority of her life running, hiding, and dealing with her past and the actions of her father, a high-ranking Nazi—will it all catch up with her? There's so much nuance, so much humanity in this book. At times you root for Gretel, at times you want to shake her. In a world that feels increasingly black and white, Boyne offers the grey in this sweeping and magnetic historical novel. — Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Review
“When is a monster’s child culpable? Guilt and complicity are multifaceted. John Boyne is a maestro of historical fiction. You can’t prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel.”
—John Irving, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The World According to Garp
“This novel, this exceptional, layered and compelling story, is built on modern history and all of us people who live it. The protagonist, the elderly, forthright and mysterious Mrs. Fernsby, is more than memorable and every one of Boyne’s characters, and every scene, dark or light, is limned in truth and insight. This book moves like a freight train,with force and consequence for the reader.”
—Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of In Love
“John Boyne has written a propulsive, heartrending mystery that delivers on both an intellectual and emotional level. It is the story of Gretel Fernsby, a ninety-one year old woman who has spent her life keeping a terrible secret, and the reckoning she faces when past and present collide. Complex. Ferocious. Beautiful and hard. I could not pu
