Author:Edith Velmans
Winner of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for Non-fiction
Edith's Book (published as Edith's Story in the US) is often compared to Anne Frank's diary. In occupied Holland, Edith, from a lively, loving Jewish family in The Hague, went into hiding the same month as Anne Frank, both Edith and Anne kept diaries, which are remarkably similar in their pre-war teen preoccupations with boys, school and parties. But Edith's world gradually darkens. When Nazi laws forbid her from attending school, riding her bike or even going to the beach, she wears the yellow star as a badge of honour, prompting people in the street to tell her to keep her chin up.
In 1943, she is forced into hiding with forged papers, posing as a family friend in a courageous gentile household in the south of Holland, where a Nazi officer is billeted in the room next to hers. Under constant danger of discovery and betrayal, she receives terrible news from home in dribs and drabs-the deportation to the death camps first of her brother, then her mother and grandmother, never to be heard from again, while her father dies broken-hearted in a far-off hospital. Edith can only dare shout her real name to the wind, and wait for liberation.
Unlike Anne Frank, Edith survived to tell her tale, and her moving teenage diary is enhanced by heartbreaking letters from her parents. A poignant coda is that after the war she became friends in the maternity ward with Miep Gies, who had helped to hide the Franks.
Truly moving...leaving one with great hope in humanity.
—— Julia Neuberger , The TimesBoth memoir and meditation, it is moving and wise... neither sanguine nor sentimental about the Holocaust and man's capacity for evil. It shows that a belief in goodness... is the key to living well with such a past. The most vivid evocation of the experience of Nazi Occupation I have ever read.
—— Linda Holt , The IndependentIt's impossible to get through this inspiring and great-hearted volume dry-eyed, or without admiration for people who so bravely persevere through unimaginable hardship and privation.
—— The Washington PostGives all the pain and pleasure of reading Anne Frank for the first time.
—— Esther FreudIt holds you with the same intensity as The Diary of Anne Frank and leaves you heart-broken, illuminated, and amazed at the capacity for courage.
—— The GuardianOne of the best and most moving memoirs I have ever read.
—— Ruth Rendell , Sunday TimesEdith's Story, the memoir of an Anne Frank who lived, reminds us of the old horror all the more effectively bu not being a horror story. Evil and grief, without being scanted, are outshone by sweetness, freshness, and pluck.
—— Roy Blount Jr.A significant Holocaust memoir... A valuable opportunity to see the situation just outside Anne's attic.
—— Kirkus ReviewsA totally original comedy writer
—— Michael PalinA compelling account of the bloody and deluded last days of the Third Reich ... this is far from being of mere academic interest ... The greatest strength of Kershaw's narrative is that he gives us much more than the view from the top ... Interwoven are insights into German life and death at all levels of society
—— The Times[Kershaw] understands as well as any man alive the complex power structure that existed in Nazi Germany ... Gripping ... arguably the most convincing portrait of Germany's Götterdämmerung we have seen so far
—— Wall Street JournalBritain's most feted and prolific historian of the Third Reich
—— Sunday Times[Kershaw] is among the foremost western scholars of Nazi Germany. Although this book pursues a narrative of events between June 1944 and May 1945, its real business is to explore the psychology of the German people
—— Max Hastings , Sunday TimesAn insightful study of how the Führer held his grip over the German people for so long
—— TelegraphComprehensive ... it generates real power
—— ObserverPulsing with imaginative energy, it displays Morrison’s veteran ability to combine physical and social immediacy with psychological and emotional subtlety. A fine addition to Morrison’s expansive chronicling of black American history, Home is a compact triumph.
—— Sunday TimesA highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia.
—— SpectatorMorrison's writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page
—— Sunday TelegraphHome is a powerful reminder of the impact the past plays on the present
—— The TimesMorrison can say more in one word than most novelists manage in an entire book. Superb
—— Glasgow Sunday HeraldBursting with poetic language and horrific events this is a penetrating insight to the African-American experience
—— The LadyIt is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety
—— GuardianToni Morrison’s mesmerising prose manages to be both elegiac and visceral at the same time
—— Mail on Sunday
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