Dan Vyleta Libri

Berlino, inverno 1946. La guerra è appena terminata e la città mostra al mondo tutte le sue ferite. Non c’è quasi edificio che sia rimasto in piedi e gli abitanti si aggirano come spettri, in attesa che il cielo plumbeo si apra e accada qualche miracolo che permetta loro di sopravvivere. Anche Pavel Richter non possiede quasi nulla, a parte i tanti libri che tappezzano le pareti del suo appartamento. Con lui c’è Anders, un orfanello che traffica nel mercato nero e procura a Pavel la penicillina di cui ha bisogno per una brutta infezione ai reni. In cambio, Pavel cerca di fare da padre e da insegnante al ragazzino. Al piano di sopra abita Sonia, una donna che come tante altre ha un solo bene da offrire in cambio di ciò che le serve per non morire di stenti: il proprio corpo. Che cosa la unisce a Pavel? Ma soprattutto, chi è veramente, Pavel Richter? Ha il passaporto americano e parla alla perfezione quattro lingue, compreso il russo; legge Dickens ad alta voce e cita a memoria Dostoevskij, ma non batte ciglio quando il suo migliore amico, Boyd White, di professione magnaccia, si presenta alla sua porta con una strana consegna: un cadavere...

The Second World War is over - and yet it lives on. As the initial phase of denazification draws to a close, people across Vienna begin to rebuild their lives amidst the rubble. Anna Beer returns to the city she fled years earlier upon discovering her husband's infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Travelling on the same train is eighteen-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather's sickbed and the secrets of his family's past. As Anna and Robert navigate an unrecognizable city, beneath the bombed-out ruins a ghost of a man, wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future that is deeply uncertain for all.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed and he wants to know why. But these are uncharitable times and one must be careful where one probes... When an unexpected house call leads Doctor Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Across the shared courtyard there is nine-year-old Anneliese, the lonely daughter of an alcoholic. Five windows to the left lives a secretive mime who comes home late at night and keeps something - or someone - precious hidden from view. From the garret drifts the mournful sound of an Oriental's trumpet, and a basement door swings closed behind the building's inscrutable janitor. Does one of these enigmatic neighbours have blood on their hands? Doctor Beer, who has his own reasons for keeping his private life hidden from public scrutiny, reluctantly becomes embroiled in an enquiry that forces him to face the dark realities of Nazi rule.

Mesmerising, electrifying, Dickensian, dystopian - SOOT welcomes us into a world in which your sin is visible.

For once both comparisons (with Harry Potter and Philip Pullman's Northern Lights ) are apt . . . this is a novel that stays in the imagination long after it is read THE GUARDIAN 20160716