Alone in Berlin

by Hans Fallada, Penguin, 608pp, £20, Week Bookshop £18 (incl. p&p). This "truly great book", published in 1947, has only now been translated into English for the first time, said Justin Cartwright in the Sunday Telegraph. After the war, a minister in the new German government gave the novelist Hans Fallada a Gestapo file on a couple who had made a stand against the Nazis.

Within weeks, Fallada had written Alone in Berlin, a work of "cool, devastating realism"; soon after, he died from drug addiction. The novel tells the story of a tenement in working-class Berlin, centring on the lives of a factory foreman and his wife, who turn against Hitler after their son is killed in France, and start to leave subversive postcards around the capital. "I urge you to read it."

"To bring the story to life, Fallada assembles a staff of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores, Nazi veterans in a haze of drink," said James Buchan in the Guardian, "as well as ordinary working-class people trying to put food on the table." Alone in Berlin is patchy in places – as one might expect, said Tom Deveson in the Sunday Times. But it draws an "appallingly" convincing picture of life under the Reich.

LAST UPDATED 12:58 PM, MARCH 20, 2009