An audacious, compelling read

'An extremely unsettling exploration of the way in which world affairs can be shaped by medical trivialities... Norman Ohler's achievement lies in ruthlessly uncovering the underside of German warfare. This book transforms the overall picture.'

Very good and extremely interesting - a serious piece of scholarship very well-researched

Alexievich is like a doctor probing the scar tissue of a traumatised nation

What Alexievich is doing is giving voice to the voiceless, exposing not only stories we wouldn't otherwise hear but individuals as well

The least well-known wonderful writer I've ever come across

Alexievich serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books

Alexievich has become one of my heroes

The Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature

Alexievich's "documentary novels" are crafted and edited with a reporter's cool eye for detail and a poet's ear for the intricate rhythms of human speech. Reading them is like eavesdropping on a confessional. This is history at its rawest and most uncomfortably intimate

Alexievich's artistry has raised oral history to a totally different dimension

This masterly book may well change forever what we thought we knew about response of the German people to the war

Riveting

Thought-provoking

Superb study

[A] riveting account of how these ordinary Germans experienced and sustained the war

Places a flashlight inside the heads of “ordinary” Germans… Thought provoking

well written and human account of a period of madness and how individuals sought to make sense of it

Nicholas Stargardt spotlights the surprising twists and turns in the popular embrace of both the war and Nazi racial extremism. He explains—as few have—why the German people fought to the finish, whereas even the supposedly fanatical Japanese surrendered before an invasion of the homeland

Ambitious and absorbing new book.

[A] revelatory book.

I enjoyed this book immensely…This book fills a vast gap in our knowledge of history and I am glad to have read it.

Book of the Week: When Keggie Carew started to investigate her father's past, she knew she was in a race against time... vivid accounts of her father's past exploits are punctuated with painful bulletins detailing his mental decline ... An extraordinary life and a sui generis debut.

An engaging, funny and evocative depiction of war, snobbery, deprivation, insanity, dementia and ghastly relatives. The author captures the flavour of every scene she describes... holding the reader's attention with masterfully constructed intercut sequences of ancient, recent and modern family history

This is in part a work of reconstruction, unravelling Tom's life, partly a family history, and it's fascinating

This is a story of journeys, love, loss, memory and family and Boy's Own daring... beautiful, nostalgic, moving, shocking, swashbuckling and simply unputdownable

I’m halfway through Dadland by Keggie Carew and OH THIS BOOK. Beautiful and fierce and brave. Memory and war and family and loss and, well, wow.

I loved Dadland for its tenderness, humour and candour. It has begun to open the door for me to what may well lie ahead in my life, in so many of our lives, in terms of ageing parents. And it has also taught me something deeply moving about tolerance, and about love

A wonderful, haunting and beautifully written memoir... I found myself laughing out loud at times and, at others, unable to hold back the tears... An absolutely stunning book

Dadland has the weight of family love but fizzes along in accessible and dynamic prose, highly recommended

A mesmerising performance by a natural storyteller gifted with the most seductive material possible, in the wild and wonderful life of her exasperating Irish father. Pain and annoyance is transmuted into pure narrative gold, as Keggie Carew interrogates the legend of this wartime adventurer and the bitter comedy of his domestic relationships and his late decline. A brave, risk-taking tale that alarms, delights and moves. As soon as you come to the end, you want to start again, to see if those things really happened

You love these people from the first page ... As Tom's life falls apart memory by memory, Keggie is picking it up again and her storytelling is spell-binding. Effortlessly readable, this is a delight combining laughter - and tears, yes, quite a few of those.

Compelling

A moving memoir-cum-biography.

By some margin my Book of the Month... A detective story, a family history, a thrilling tale of derring-do, and the most distinctive and affecting memoir I’ve read since H is for Hawk.

Utterly remarkable, and beautifully evoked… Dadland is a completely riveting, deeply poignant “manhunt” for which I predict great things.

Dadland, by Keggie Carew, is being tipped for award-winning breakout success in the vein of H is for Hawk

It’s an exorcism, ghost-hunt and swim through the archipelago of her father’s shattered self… The author’s descriptions have an easy lyricism.

The old question 'what did you do in the war, Dad?' has never had a more surprising or moving answer.

Warm and funny, sometimes regretful and sad, but overall a read like a rollercoaster. Wonderful.

You know the saying that everyone has a book in them? Well, unless your book is as good as this, I'd give up right now

You know the saying that everyone has a book in them? Well, unless your book is as good as this, I’d give up right now… This gripping book, written with real verve and a narrative expertise that wouldn’t shame a veteran.

A brilliant, bittersweet biography.

Keggie’s writing is immersive… She writes with a warmth and generosity about her father, a man who was a genuine character and hero.

Dadland is deeply personal. But it is also the story of our generations: people touched by war and by Alzheimer’s