A brutal, devastatingly honest story of the trenches that somehow retains its humour, and its poetry, to the end

An unusual, original and charming addition to that great army of WWI novels

A century after the Great War, Schlump reappears in Jamie Bulloch's excellent new translation and the extraordinary story of its rediscovery probably warrants a novel of its own...exceptional

One of the great First World War novels, about a German soldier in a French village, who falls in love with it. It’s full of criticism of how the war was conducted by Germany, so when Hitler came in, it was burnt.

The best of German war books so far

Schlump…was considered anti-nationalistic, anti-heroic, philanthropic, pacifist, pro-French, humanistic, European, quite good-humoured and well-written. A bright book from a dark time… The book burners were completely right: an un-German book

Grimm’s major achievement is his ability to balance such unsentimental accounts of people’s wartime sufferings alongside the unfailing delight of Schlump’s gauche charm

A thoroughly unconventional First World War novel, part fable, part documentary […] non-nationalistic, Francophile, astute, romantic and accurate

[Grimm] combines elements of the picaresque with all the bleakness of First World War literature