Thank you for the chance to review this book, however, unfortunately, I was unable to read and review this title before it was archived.

Long and complex fresco that accompanies for many years the lives of the protagonists, in particular Anna and Lisa. The first Jewish "slave" in the service of an SS officer, who survived, but as a wreck discarded by the tide, to the retirement of his "master" because of the advancement of the Red Army after having been repeatedly raped; the second, in turn, survived, still infant, at the death of her mother, Jewish too, rescued from a German family who would nurture her as a grandson, but for many years hiding her true identity. The fate of the two women intertwines in life and memories, returning several times on her footsteps, making and repeating mistakes, because in turn Anna will hide for many years the truth to her son Shimon, who will not know until adulthood to be the child of a rape, and for this reason, for the weight of the sensation of some denied truth, will try to lose himself in the drug, until he meets Lisa.
A myriad of other characters weave their story with that of these two women, all somehow victims of a lie (the children of Anna's persecutor, the man who saved and married Anna, friends, acquaintances and, in full, the entire German people). Among all of them, Frau Kramer emerges, by moral stature, as the only personification of the good.
Perhaps a little bit too ambitious, and sometimes discontinuous in style, it's in any case an excellent novel that manages to balance fairly well the historical events and the soul of the protagonists.
I thank Quercus Books and Netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

This lengthy novel starts in German-occupied Poland towards the end of the Second World War and the German forces are in retreat from the advancing Red Army. The story focuses on three main protagonists: two Jewish survivors of the War, Anna Stirnweiss and Lisa Kramer, and a former S.S. officer, Josef Ranzner, who returns to Germany from captivity in the Soviet Union and takes on a new identity. The author shows how the War reverberates throughout the lives of the characters and even crucially influences those who either were just children or were born after the end of hostilities. For all of them the War is never over. And even if they can find some form of peace or reconciliation, then the random nature of human life trumps all anyway.
There is no conventional linear narrative, and the author uses a variety of means to advance the meandering plot. It is literary, intelligent reflective fiction that descends deep inside the protagonists’ consciousness, their motivations and most private thoughts – their various experiences of the horrors of the conflict and its aftermath are examined from unusual but intriguing perspectives. It demands the reader’s full alertness, but is rewarding and wholly engaging reading. The plot has a couple of blistering coincidences that keep the characters swirling together in the maelstrom of life, and there are a couple of historical errors. This is a deeply political novel, elements of which may irk the reader depending upon one’s own position and interpretation of events. Nevertheless, it is a superb account of humanity and what it means to be human.

Kingdom of Twilight by Steven Uhly is a massive novel that starts with the assassination of a young SS officer in Poland and traces the consequences for the various participants over the next 4 decades, ranging from Poland to Germany to Israel.

When I started this I thought that it was unbearably grim and looking down at the corner of my Kindle I saw that I had over 10 hours of reading ahead of me. I almost gave up, I'm so glad that I didn't. Instead I dug in and read the whole thing in 2 or 3 big sessions over a weekend, it is mesmerising.

I thought I knew a fair bit about the challenges that holocaust survivors faced after the war but Kingdom of Twilight opened my eyes to how much the survivors suffered again in their efforts to find resettlement and new lives outside of Germany. Uhly is a German author and this is not a Nazi bashing novel, it is a story of how far people will go to to survive, the challenges of facing the past and the extent to which those in power will elevate pragmatism and politics over humanity. In the end it is a wonderfully uplifting book which I could not have predicted when I started.

I know my European Jewish background makes me slightly biased but I thought this was a fantastic read, thought provoking, tense and mysterious.

This is a must read and the first time in ages that I have wanted to give a novel 5/5!

This is a vast book which impressed me with its historical research and breadth of material, but it's so panoramic in its shifts between Poland, its sweep across Europe and into Israel, and so broad in its timescale from about 1943 to 1980 that the characters got lost, submerged beneath the weight of so much pressure of story. As a result, this records events very well but the book feels emotionally detached: people are there to represent the story, rather than the story evolving organically from the characters. I was left interested in what happens but unmoved - and I wanted to be made to feel.

The book is structured to start in Nazi-occupied Poland in the second half of the war as the Red Army advances and here we get to know a small group of characters fairly well. Then as they're displaced, the story launches into a jagged timeline so that in one chapter we're still in the war, in the next we're with different characters in 1955, then back to 1944 with a diferent character again, and forward to 1980, back to 1967 in Israel and so on. It's awkward and unsettling and in the leaps continuity of character is lost.

The sections concerned with the mass emigration to Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel are interesting but the subject gets a bit lost in all the backwards and forwards movements and what turns into a family saga of convoluted identities and relationships.

So this is a hugely ambitious book but it feels like the documentary side overwhelms the novel: a closer, clearer focus on the characters would have carried the story better and made it more impactful for me.

Posted on Amazon and Goodreads