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All That I Am
All That I Am
Oct 25, 2024 6:33 AM

Author:Anna Funder,Saul Reichlin,Judy Bennett

All That I Am

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Anna Funder's All That I Am, a powerful love story that tells the heroic and tragic true story of the German resistance. Read by Judy Bennett and Saul Reichlin.

One September morning, elderly Ruth Wesemann wakes to the sound of a parcel being delivered to her door. Inside she finds a tattered little notebook. Opening its delicate pages she meets with a flood of memories...

It's 1933 and she is back in her light-filled flat in Berlin. Hans is making caipirinhas, snow falls outside the kitchen window, and Hitler is making his first speech as Chancellor of Germany. Her life and those of her tight-knit group of friends are about to change beyond all recognition. Having dedicated themselves to resisting the Nazi's rise, they have become hunted outlaws overnight. Fleeing the country, Ruth and Hans find refuge in a basement flat in Bloomsbury, but inspired by Ruth's fearless cousin Dora, they defy the conditions of their visas and risk being sent back to Germany in order continue their dangerous resistance work. But with each breathtaking act of courage and every person that they trust, they cannot help but risk betrayal and deceit. And then, one day, they face the chilling realisation that Hitler's reach extends much further than they had thought, even to London itself.

Inspiring, tragic and based on real events, All That I Am is a masterful and devastating novel of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices that people endure to protect their beliefs and of discovering remarkable heroism hidden in the most unexpected of places.

Reviews

Brilliant and necessary ... Here is someone who knows how to tell the truth

—— Evening Standard on Stasiland

A journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting

—— Sunday Times Books of the Year

A terrific act of life-giving to people who have lacked not just a voice but an audience

—— Telegraph

Anna Funder proved herself a first-rate reporter with Stasiland - now she appears as a compelling novelist in a dark story of German emigres in the 1930s, struggling to warn the indifferent English against the Nazis

—— Claire Tomalin

The subtlety of Anna Funder's novel is in the elegance of her precise prose, and in her painstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in extraordinary events...The result is a strong and impressively humane novel

—— Ruth Scurr , TLS

A superb novel that transcends its setting...This book is a wonder. Do, please, read it

—— The Spectator

History, like hope, is not something to be solved, but to be carried. Anna Funder has written an essential novel about how we carry the bricks of history on our backs, and how we continually build new homes from the material of the past. All That I Am is an intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another. Funder breathes life into Kundera's aperçu that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting

—— Colum McCann

A seamless and powerful tale...the book is far more than "faction"; Funder has successfully transformed the material into a narrative of individual endeavour and survival, that examines universal human themes...Dora and Ruth, especially, convey a sense of truthfulness and decency that transcends their time and should inspire us, even now, to expose injustice and tyranny

—— Rachel Hore , Independent on Sunday

The strengths of Funder's writing are emotional and imaginative.In what she has to say about love, loss and betrayal there is profound truth

—— The Times

Emotional novels populated by loveable, believable characters are what Jojo Moyes does best. A hugely enjoyable, wide-ranging and believable novel. Beautifully done

—— Good Housekeeping

a book of signal wit and beauty that shows many ways of being a woman under intolerable strain... The electrifying ubiquity of danger - the novel is set in London under the Blitz - summons tenderness and the appetite for life. London itself breathes, turns and glows throughout

—— Candia McWilliam , The Lady

He [Anthony] hooks you in with his deep, complex characters; he meticulously sets the scene

—— www.thebookbag.co.uk
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