The Song Before It Is Sung A Novel

by Cartwright, Justin

• ISBN13: 9781596912687
• ISBN10: 1596912685
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-10
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He had the main conspirators brutally strung up on meat hooks. Among the executed was Axel von Gottberg, a German Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who returned home in 1934, to the dismay of his Oxford friends, particularly Elya Mendel. Sixty years later, Elya, now a distinguished professor, leaves behind a collection of papers and letters to a former student, Conrad Senior, and asks him to find out the truth about Axel, whom he had condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. But the more Conrad tries to uncover the truth, the more complex he finds the relationship between the two friends, especially in their involvement with two beautiful English cousins. As Conrad investigates obsessively, his own life comes apart. Weaving darkly through these complex stories is an infamous film of Axel's execution; a film which Conrad is desperate to find, for reasons he can barely understand himself. Wonderfully writtenand based on true eventsThe Song Before It Is Sungis a novel of profound and sensitive insight into the human condition, spanning Oxford in the 1930s, prewar Prussia, and contemporary Britain and surpassing all of Cartwright's previous works in its scope and ambition.

Author Biography

Justin Cartwright is the author of In Every Face I Meet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize; Leading the Cheers, which won the Whitbread; White Lightning, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread; and, most recently, The Promise of Happiness, which won the 2005 Hawthornden Prize and the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award, forthcoming this spring as a paperback. He was born in South Africa but has lived all his adult life, since graduating from Oxford, in London.

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