Description
John Boyne's quietly devastating, formally inventive novel—narrated by the nine-year-old son of a Nazi concentration camp commandant who befriends a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence—approaches one of history's greatest crimes through the eyes of a child who cannot fully comprehend what he is witnessing, generating its devastating effect through the gap between what the narrator sees and what the reader understands. Written with extraordinary formal restraint and genuine ethical courage, this is essential reading for every person who believes that the best historical fiction about the Holocaust must be morally serious above all other things. An important novel.
