Cold Crematorium

by József Debreczeni

(Penguin)

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József Debreczeni Credit: Mirko Bruner

Between May and July in 1944, Hungary despatched 430,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, even though by that point it was clear Nazi Germany was losing the war. The journalist József Debreczeni was one of them and recorded with meticulous detail the purposeful almost mechanical dehumanisation of the Jewish prisoners and the curious power hierarchies of camp life. His account, published in Yugoslavia 1950, has only now been translated, expertly so by Paul Olchvary. An instant classic.

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The Gates of Gaza

by Amir Tibon

(Scribe)

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Tibon spent most of October 7 locked with his wife and two daughters in a safe room in his house in Nahal Oz while around him Hamas terrorists massacred his friends and neighbours. His startling ear witness account provides a lens for a wider ranging analysis of recent Israeli history including a scathing attack on the country’s lack of preparation for such an attack and its many strategic failures. A vital reminder that the ongoing conflict contains no easy answers.

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Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

(Wildfire)

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Novels about the wealthy, screwed-up elite are like catnip for me. Few, though, nail the territory so acutely and lethally as the second book from Taffy Brodesser-Akner – a horribly compelling story about a very rich family still processing the fallout from the brief kidnapping of its patriarch decades after the event. The pace is relentless, the awful comic detail as this gruesome over-indulged clan grapple with their worsening fortunes sometimes almost too much. Still, resistance is futile.

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Sufferance

by Charles Palliser

(Guernica)

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Charles Palliser

An unflinching, honest, horrifying novel, and an antidote to those books and films that use the Shoah to tell uplifting moral fables,” wrote our reviewer of this sly, devastating parable which takes place in an unnamed authoritarian country. An abandoned young girl has been taken in by another family yet as the political and societal situation around them worsens, her benefactors are eventually forced to make a terrible choice. A novel that asks uncomfortable questions about the fragile nature of good intentions.

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Final Verdict

by Tobias Buck

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

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Tobias Buck

Comprising two stories: that of the trial of Bruno Dey for war crimes in Germany, which Buck attended as a journalist, and that of Buck’s family, in particular his grandfather, an early member of the Nazi party, this is a swift, sharp book. The question of collective guilt, of individual culpability, the difficulty of serving retrospective justice and the growing unease in Germany over “memory culture” are all assiduously examined in a book whose slight form belies its immense power.

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​Children’s books

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A Drop of Golden Sun

by Kate Saunders 

(Faber)

Kate Saunders

It’s 1973 and Jenny is making her film debut in a musical about a singing, dancing nanny and an escape from Nazi-occupied territory. On one level, A Drop of Golden Sun is a thoroughly enjoyable Noel Streatfeild-esque story: Jenny and her co-stars, posh John, bumptious Belinda and troubled Harriet, are fully realised characters with interesting back stories. But it’s not all raindrops on roses. The war is a living memory for the older characters; the actor playing the chief Nazi is an Austrian Jew, while the production’s superstar wants to wear a prosthetic “Jewish nose”. Age 11 up.