About this item
" A tour de force, a work of art, an insightful commentary on the horrors and pointlessness of war and violence, a love story . . . so beautifully written that it hurts . . . Gripping from start to finish . . . One of the best novels I have read this year. Actually, maybe one of the best novels I have read, period. " - Booksellers NZ Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Siggi lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words ("promise", "love", "mercy") from books. Erich is an only child living a lush rural life near Leipzig, tending beehives, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions. Drawn together as Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city people are talking of surrender. The days Siggi and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives. Watching over Siggi and Erich is the wish child, the mysterious narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the wreckage of a nation's dream.
About the Author
Catherine Chidgey is a novelist and short story writer whose work has been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in her region. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was Time Out's book of the year, a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. The Axeman's Carnival won the Acorn at the New Zealand Book Awards - the country's biggest literary prize. Raised in Wellington, New Zealand, Chidgey was educated at Victoria University and in Berlin, where she held a DAAD scholarship for post-graduate study in German literature. She lives in Ngruawhia and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.
