The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, looks back on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, and the death camps as Nazi Germany falls.
Set during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and in Berlin, The Kindly Ones is narrated by Dr Max Aue, who is both a cultivated intellectual and a participant in Nazi atrocities.
From Stalingrad to the death camps and the nightmarish fall of Berlin, The Kindly Ones places Max Aue among figures including Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer and Hitler.
As the Third Reich falls, Max reflects on the career that took him through mass murder and bureaucratic power, insisting on his own version of events.
It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping..a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come -- Anthony Beevor * The Times *
An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever * Observer *
Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising * Financial Times *
A compelling and savage tale, with a cold dispassionate eye that never flinches from the raw reality of mass-murder... a serious attempt to describe the terrors of the Nazi regime * Independent *
The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail * Guardian *
An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever * Observer *
Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising * Financial Times *
A compelling and savage tale, with a cold dispassionate eye that never flinches from the raw reality of mass-murder... a serious attempt to describe the terrors of the Nazi regime * Independent *
The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail * Guardian *
Jonathan Littell was born in 1967 in New York of American parents and brought up and educated mainly in France. This novel, originally published in France as Les Bienveillantes, became a bestseller and won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Académie Française's Prix de Littérature. Previously he worked for the humanitarian agency, Action contre la faim, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He now lives in Spain.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780099513148 |
| ISBN 10 | 0099513145 |
| Title | The Kindly Ones |
| Author | Jonathan Littell |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2010-03-04 |
| Number of pages | 992 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |