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Probably the most important novel of the twenty first century.
Nick Alexander’s contribution to Gay Pride month is his best novel yet.
It begins with a casually anti-Semitic remark during a family gathering at Christmas. The grown up son and daughter of the man who makes the remark are horrified, not least because the son is in a relationship with a young Jewish woman. The daughter, who is used to frequent contact with her Irish mother’s extended family, wonders why she knows so little about her father’s French parents. All she knows is that they came to London as refugees immediately after the war when he was 5 years old.
It’s the mid-1990s and it turns out that, ten years before, her paternal grandmother recoded an interview with a journalist from a French gay magazine. In it she recorded the truth about her life in Alsace before the war, after the province’s annexation by Germany, her escape, with a friend and a Jewish infant, to a hide-away in the Alps, culminating with the emotional reunion with her gay lover in post-war London.
This is a monumental work which deals with the issue of prejudice and bigotry in modern Britain by describing how such attitudes morphed into the holocaust in which not only Jews, but many perfectly ordinary people who displayed ‘difference’, including homosexuals, were brutally tortured and murdered by the Nazis.