Christophe Bigsby Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust
Adults / scholars
This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.
Catherine Hokin The Secretary
adult
The Tower House. Down a secluded path, hidden by overgrown vines, the
crumbling villa echoes with memories. Of the family who laughed and
sang there, until the Nazis tore them from their home. And of a woman
who walked its empty rooms, whose courage in the face of evil altered
the course of history…
Germany 1940. As secretary to Himmler, the leader of the SS, Magda
spends her days sending party invitations to high-ranking Nazis, and
her evenings distributing pamphlets for the resistance. But Magda is
leading a dangerous double life, smuggling secrets out of the office.
It’s a deadly game, and eventual exposure is a certainty, but Magda is
driven by a need to keep the man she secretly loves safe as he fights
against the Nazis…
Forty years later. Nina’s heart pounds as she steps into an uncertain future carrying a forged passport, a few bank notes, and a scribbled address for The Tower House
taken from an intricate drawing she found hidden in her grandmother’s
wardrobe. Separated from her family and betrayed by her country, Nina’s
last hope is to trace her family’s history in the ruins of the past her
grandmother ran from. But, when she finally finds the abandoned house,
she opens the door to a forgotten story, and to secrets which will
change everything: past, present, and future…
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