Gretel watches the troubling relationship between vulnerable, nine-year-old Henry – the same age as her brother Bruno when he died – and his aggressive father Alex Darcy-Witt. All the Broken Places by John Boyne review: misjudged thriller sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas". Gretel's story as a teenager runs parallel to her life as a 91-year-old woman living in an apartment in modern-day Mayfair, London.

When Gretel and Kurt meet in Australia and talk about their lives since the war, Kurt says, “I don’t remember making any conscious decisions about my life. Henry crawls under the fence to help Shmuel look for his dad, and the two boys are immediately swept up in a death march and led into a gas chamber.Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Only in the last years have grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators begun to break the silence on their family history in a way their parents could not. A powerful novel about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz… All the Broken Places is a defence of literature's need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist's skill, precision and power.

Gretel, Bruno's older sister, flees Poland and heads for post-war Paris with her mother, both keen to hide from their past. in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter.Steeped in grief and guilt and coloured by complicity and courage, it tells the story of Bruno’s elder sister, the long-widowed 91-year-old Gretel who is forced to confront the darkness of her family’s Nazi past in the quiet ordinariness of her present. As she tries to escape the chaos of the end of the second world war, she grapples with her memories of Auschwitz, her parents and her own part in her brother’s death.

The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “ The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. At the other end of the spectrum, masterpieces, often by survivors – Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Jean Améry – tend towards aesthetic and intellectual rigour, resisting closure and withholding comfort. A similar struggle – to acknowledge the hold of the past and free herself – is the battle of Gretel, whose story Boyne began sketching out after finishing the first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in 2004. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. She concludes that "parallel narratives – one promising, one insulting – combine into a pulpy denouement that shames the author and the reader both.

You need to tell yourself that you wouldn’t so you can feel a sense of moral superiority, but I don’t believe you for even a moment” (253).

Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment.Leading the way is Alexandra Senfft – a close friend of this reporter’s – whose grandfather Hanns Ludin was Nazi governor in occupied Slovakia. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions. Inexplicably, Henry doesn’t much question why Shmuel is bald, emaciated and imprisoned along with his entire family, which, by the way, is “disappearing” one by one (somehow Shmuel is also unaware that people are being executed).