All the Broken Places

Name: All the Broken Places
Rating: 4.52 (144625 reviews)

by John Boyne

First published 2022

Amazon

4.5(144,625)

London, 2022. Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has spent most of her life concealing that she was the daughter of a commandant at Auschwitz. After Germany’s defeat she passed through Paris and Sydney before settling in Britain, building a respectable marriage and family while guarding the history that destroyed her childhood. Her memories return to the flight from Europe, her mother’s denial and the compromises by which she learned to survive under a new identity.

When a family moves into the flat below hers, Gretel recognises signs of domestic violence and faces a choice between continued secrecy and intervention. The novel links present danger to the moral burden she has carried since 1945, asking what responsibility belongs to a child raised inside a perpetrator household and what responsibility remains when that child becomes an adult. It treats memory, shame and postwar displacement as forces that continue long after the camps were liberated.