The Kindly Ones

Jonathan Littell author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:4th Mar '10

Should be back in stock very soon

The Kindly Ones cover

Brilliant, frightening, furious, apocalyptic: The Kindly Ones is a literary tour de force and an explosive bestseller across Europe, selling over 1 million copies.

Dr Max Aue is a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. He was an observer and then a participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, he was present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the overthrow of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin.

Dr Max Aue is a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. He is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a former SS intelligence officer and cold-blooded assassin. He was an observer and then a participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, he was present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the overthrow of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin. His world was peopled by Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer and, of course, Hitler himself.

Max is looking back at his life with cool-eyed precision; he is speaking out now to set the record straight.

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 *
Nor is The Kindly Ones only a great work of history and reflection, but full of striking literary writing: consummate adagios of landscape painting; lovely images and observations...even touches of macabre humour...inescapably impressive -- Carole Angier * Literary Review *
Its account of Nazi cruelty, chaos and callousness has never been surpassed in fiction... Unforgettable...magnificent * London Review of Books *
The force and cool detachment with which author Jonathan Littell describes the physical realities of war and mass murder are searing. He has spent years on his research and clings closely to the historical record but this fictional presentation brings the accounts horrifically alive -- Mary Brodbin * Socialist Review *
[It] provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil... the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction -- Michael Gove * The Times *
It's a compelling and provocative novel -- Charlotte Stretch * Time Out *

ISBN: 9780099513148

Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 40mm

Weight: 665g

992 pages