The Right Hand of Sleep

Apr 26, 2025 10:23 PM

Author:John Wray

Oskar Voxlauer is in flight from his past - from his bourgeois Austrian upbringing; from horrific memories of fighting on the Italian Front in 1917; and from the twenty years he has spent in the Ukraine watching his Bolshevik ideals crumble and the physical decline of the woman who taught him about love.

In 1938, he finally returns to the small Austrian town of his birth where his mother is waiting to greet a son she hasn't seen since he was a boy.

But, despite Oskar's attempts to live a reclusive existence as a gamekeeper up in the hills, he cannot escape the tensions that are threatening the tranquil town of Niessen. When Hitler marches into Austria and the Blackshirts come to the valley.

Reviews

The ghost hovering over this assured and astonishingly mature first novel is that of Joseph Roth... Wray's novel displays psychological acuity, a mastery of dialogue and an unfailing historical empathy

—— Publishers Weekly

A truly arresting work of fiction

—— New York Times Book Review

A taut, searing portrait of the effects of Nazism on the psychic and physical landscape of Austria... The clarity of Wray's prose style both belies and reveals the depth and scope of this concerns

—— Literary Review

A fascinating and honest book

—— The Times

Nick Stone is emerging as one of the great all-action characters of recent times. Like his creator, the ex-SAS soldier turned uber agent is unstoppable

—— Daily Mirror

Ticking like a time-bomb, Andy McNab's latest Nick Stone adventure is full of suspense

—— Express & Star Wolverhampton

It's a blast

—— Peterborough Evening Telegraph

Subtle, persuasive and unsettling. A brilliantly troubling and heartening novel

—— Sunday Times

Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans – immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump’s election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh’s

—— New Yorker

Dazzling. The most exciting novelist writing today

—— Independent on Sunday

The novel is full of his usual furious cackling; tragedy tipping into comedy and comedy into tragedy within the space of a few sentences. The prose is beautiful

—— Mail on Sunday

A sensation

—— Sunday Times

A polemical classic

—— Esquire

Brilliant

—— Metro

One of the best writers of dialogue in the history of inverted commas

—— The Times

A reverberating celebration of family, community and humanity

—— Sunday Times

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