God Of That Summer

A child at war: at the beginning of 1945, twelve-year-old Luisa Norff and her mother and older sister had to flee to the country from bombarded Kiel. The estate of her brother-in-law Vinzent, an SS officer, becomes an unexpected space of freedom: no more lessons, and as Allied bombers fly east and more and more refugees arrive, the dazed wander through the woods trying to understand life away from the fires. Why does the sight of young Walter trouble her so? Who are the prisoners at Klostersee? Where has her sister Billie suddenly gone? And where is the wig-maker actually getting her hair? When, at a birthday celebration, her worst fears are realized, Luisa collapses under the weight of the unexplainable.

Ralf Rothmann's previous novel, To Die in Spring, was a disturbing drama about death on the battlefield. The God of that Summeris an equally devastating story about the climate of blindness and denunciation in the final months of a war that for ever darkened the souls of those who lived through it, and allows a twelve-year-old girl to justifiably say: 'I have experienced everything.'