I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and publisher.

I’m doing a challenge to read books set in as many different countries as possible. Some I’ve read felt like they could have been set anywhere and didn’t really reflect that country. That is not at all the case with Darkenbloom. The location, country and setting were so utterly integral to this story. The town itself, the history and the local culture are absolutely essential to making this story what it is.

When first reading this book, we meet a lot of different residents of the town. We have a variety of eclectic characters, gaining insight into what they’re doing now, who they are and what has made them that way. It’s not clear early on how they are all connected other than as residents of the town. Some of these I enjoyed more than others such as the woman buying the pug. However in part three of the book, their tales all interweave quite spectacularly and satisfyingly. There are quite a lot of characters to keep track of as we span decades of history of the town.

This is often a strange book, there’s little dialogue, and often long pieces of insight into the history of the characters. This book explores the historic legacy of the town that still looms over it, the secrets people have been keeping for many years and particularly those people wish to keep hidden. This does reference historic horrors and characters do express prejudice.

This is a novel about lies, secrets and crimes of the past, set in a small town on the Austrian border. Inevitably, it deals with WW2 and the Nazi period which hasn't completely died, but given that the date is 1989, there are also issues of the reunification of Germany and what will happen in the future, building on this acutely troubled past. The tone is stylised: sometimes like a camera panning the scene, sometimes as commentary, and I was reminded in places of The Master & Margerita, with a kind of surreal edge. I found it all a bit confusing and never really entered the book in terms of engagement - something about the writing seemed to hold me at arm's length.