Years after the Cold War ends and the Berlin Wall falls, Neil Fischer inherits a whole German village from his father. Despite his knowledge and his experiences having already restored homes in England, he struggles with his relationships with the villagers, yet eventually forming a bond with brother and sister Thomas & Silke. Secrets are uncovered as he and Silke delve into the past of the Cold War years.

I struggled with this a little, a dark time in history

Thanks to Netgalley, the author and publishers for an ARC in return for an honest review

Neil Fisher has, somewhat bizarrely, inherited a whole village in the former East Germany from his father. Since the fall of the wall, conditions there have deteriorated and Neil feels duty bound to restore and revitalise the whole village, something he believes his father would have wanted. Having had a troubled relationship with his father, he is still trying to appease him. But rather than being greeted by the villagers with enthusiasm as some sort of saviour, he is met with suspicion and resentment, not helped by Neil’s own awkwardness and social ineptness. He lodges with Silke and Thomas, who are also dealing with the traumas of the past, in particular their relationship with the Stasi. It’s impossible for any of the protagonists to escape their past. It’s a quietly dark and disturbing novel about oppression, secrecy and lies. I found it an absorbing and compelling read, suspenseful and unpredictable, chilling and haunting. A small but powerful gem, beautifully written, expertly paced and an intelligent and thoughtful examination of the GDR’s legacy.

Hostility and silence lay the ground work for a hallucinatory and dreamlike examination of oppression in all its forms. A magnetic and compulsive read.

Neil Fischer is shy, socially awkward and repressed – an English archetype. His late father, though, was from East Germany. Their relationship was difficult, his father volatile and controlling. Now he has one last surprise for Neil – he has bequeathed him the village where he was born. Marschwald is now reduced to a handful of crumbling buildings and the few residents who haven’t moved on since reunification opened up greater opportunities.

Neil travels there, with no clear idea of what to do, but with a vague idea that he can renovate his property for the good of the remaining villagers. While there he stays with Silke and her brother Thomas. Silke has difficult memories of the East German regime and Neil’s presence acts as a catalyst for her to confront her past.

Instructions for the Working Day has some very dark elements, confronting, as it does, the nature of tyranny, cruelty and the way the voice of an oppressor can be internalised. Neil and Silke are both, in their ways, imprisoned by their pasts.

The changes Silke and the former East Germans have experienced are vividly evoked, as is the psychological hold of the regime which left its victims unable to trust their own perceptions. This is counterpointed with Neil’s outsider’s perspective, his confusion at social norms, his imperfect recall of the time he spent in East Germany with his parents, his fractured sense of self, lending the book a hallucinatory quality, shot through with moments of dark comedy.

Those of us who read a lot can become jaded, too often feeling like we know what’s coming next. What I like most about Instructions for the Working Day is its freshness. It’s not quite like any other book I can think of, distinctive, disturbing and memorable.
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I received a copy of Instructions for the Working Day from the publisher via Netgalley.

A quiet, thought-provoking and tragic novel. It is engrossing as we follow Neil and Silke as their stories develop and merge across the book. As the truths to their histories reveal themselves there is sadness and tension that keeps you gripped to the pages. Looking at oppression, suspicion and difficult family relationships, this is a dark but intoxicating read.

Instructions for the Working Day by Joanna Campbell was such a great read. Neil has inherited a sinking village in East Germany from his now deceased father, and he has taken it upon himself to discover what needs to be done to save the town. He becomes almost obsessed with saving the school first and foremost, but there are no children or young families around to populate the school. Through flashbacks to hsi own childhood we get a glimpse of why he seems to be so fixated on the building. There is a dual storyline going on as well of two siblings who grew up in this village, left and came back under very different circumstances. Both survived, to different extents, the East German Stasi regime and the story unfolds a tangled web of deceit and intrigue surrounding them.

This description makes it sound much more action packed than it, but this book is subtle and absolutely fascinating. The main character Neil at first seems to be just a super nice guy. But as he lingers, he becomes one of the most detestable characters I've ever read. I didn't find myself cringing like I typically would with an unlikable character, I found myself physically disgusted by him. The village is it's own character as well in the story, a dripping wet, grey, gloomy hovel of a village that will never be able to account for anything. Much like our main character.

A few parts of the story seemed a little disjointed, were these dreams, hallucinations, hunts of magical realism? But due to the dire subject of the story, it was welcome to break it up a little. Overall this was a fantastic book and I will highly recommend it.

What an interesting book this is. It has a great premise but delivers more, mainly through incredibly evocative writing of place and characters.

Instructions is the story of Neil, whose father has died and has left him a village in the former East Germany, built on marshes and left to deteriorate badly. Neil's relationship with his father was strained, to say the least, and we learn more about this as the book goes on. Neil has made some money back in England revamping old houses and selling them on, and is keen to try out some of his skills in Germany, to help bring the village back to life the way he assumes his father would have wanted.

However, it was never going to be that simple. When Neil arrives at the village, he The villagers are distrustful and wary of him, perhaps for obvious reasons, it is immediately clear that the problems of the village will need more work than the basic skills that Neil has to offer.

Neil stays with brother and sister Thomas and Silke, with one of the only habitable houses in the place. Silke does her bit to welcome Neil but there is clearly a strange atmosphere between the siblings, more secrets for the reader to uncover. Silke takes Neil into her confidence and asks him to drive her to Berlin so that she can investigate her past. When she does so, the final layer of the book is uncovered.

The book has a supernatural element which manifests itself through hallucinations and dreams, which contributes to the story in a way, but the strongest element of the book is the place itself. The village is dank, lingering in grey damp unpleasantness and the troubled history is always there with the inhabitants, almost like you travel back in time or that the village is haunted. It's evocative and the sense of place is very well written.

What also comes through strongly is how much the past shapes everything; all these characters are deeply impacted by their personal history and the lingering effects of the East German regime on the people.

This is a strong debut from Joanna Campbell but it is a solemn book, blending surreal elements, dark humour and tragedy into one absorbing read.

In the end this is quite a dark novel about oppression both by society and family. At the start of the novel Neil inherits his fathers home village in Germany. His father was an overbearing and demanding father and husband. When Neil gets to the town of Marschwald, it is decrepit and rundown since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the people are suspicious and unfriendly. He stays with sister and brother, Silke and Thomas in their dilapidated house. They have their own difficult relationship. The story is told with flashbacks to Neil’s childhood and Silke’s life at University in East Berlin. The pacing is slow but engrossing. As the truth of both characters histories are revealed it’s hard to look away. And the end! I didn’t expect that.

Set in a dilapidated village, Instructions for the Working Day follows Neil Fischer who has inherited this settlement from his father whose childhood home it was, exploring the fallout from the fall of the Berlin Wall, heralded as a liberation by the west.

Neil has travelled to Marschwald to assess its state and whether it can be restored. Hostility and silence greet him at every turn; only Silke with whom he’s lodging, welcomes him. The villagers have high expectations and are unimpressed with this man who now owns their crumbling homes. Thirty years after the Wall came down, Silke has decided to visit Berlin where she spent barely a term at university. What she discovers there is devastating, a secret she confides in Neil who has his own revelations to deal with.

This is a quietly riveting novel, hard to write about without out giving too much away. Campbell switches between the present and the past, exploring the aftermath of the Wall’s fall from both Neil’s and Silke’s perspectives as she unfolds their backstories: Neil’s childhood as the son of a controlling father given to playing mind-games with his son from which he’s never recovered, his grip on reality tenuous; Silke’s attempts to escape a regime whose surveillance machine was vast, recruited from friends, family and neighbours, and her determination to learn the truth. Freedom was a longed for prize for many, but it came with a high psychological cost to those who had long been schooled to fear what was on the other side of a barrier supposedly erected to defend them. Campbell leaves you with much to contemplate while delivering a suspenseful piece of storytelling which had me gripped to its end.