From the Diary of a Snail

'Actual factual elements are fused with imagined, created things, curt yet marvellously explosive observations: the result is a difficult, dynamic book, like no other... certainly an event in the reader's life and possibly in literature's history' - Sunday Times

Probably the most autobiographical of his novels, From the Diary of a Snail balances the agonising history of the persecuted Danzig Jews with an account of Grass's political campaigning with Willie Brandt.

Probably the most autobiographical of his novels, From the Diary of a Snail balances the agonising history of the persecuted Danzig Jews with an account of Grass's political campaigning with Willie Brandt. Underlying all is the snail, the central symbol that is both model and a parody of social progress, and a mysterious metaphor for political reform.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of The Tin Drum.