John Boyne

The daughter of an Auschwitz commandant, now in her 90s, looks back on a lifetime of guilt in Boyne's follow-up to his 2006 bestseller.

In time, Gretel realises that the man in the flat below is torturing his wife and nine-year-old son, who is the same age as Bruno and Shmuel were when they died: what then will she do? But it is a skilful novel on its own very narrow terms, if you know nothing about the Holocaust, and if you wish to know nothing, and that is the danger of All the Broken Places too. I don’t doubt there is a valuable novel to be written about Nazi children, but Boyne does not choose this path. Bruno is kindly: he is impervious to Nazism, and he calls the Führer the Fury. That is what the subject demands, if you want to be seemly. He is not yet dead, and already he is silenced.