News from Berlin

Otto De Kat (translated by Ina Rilke)

IN JUNE of 1941, Oscar Verschuur, a middle-aged Dutch diplomat whose status may or may not be more than meets the eye, has been posted to Berne in Switzerland. The war is raging but not yet in fullest flow: the Bismark has been sunk, the island of Crete is all but lost, but Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Stalin is holding. While Oscar is ostensibly safe in a neutral city, his wife, Kate, is in London, working as a nurse in a military hospital, and their daughter, Emma, is in Berlin, married to Carl, a secretly anti-Hitler employee in the German Foreign Ministry.

The novel skips deftly between strands, touching on the current situation of each family member. Each angle is, in its way, gripping, driven as it is by a sense of immediacy that echoes the life-and-death nature of the time.