Overview

The new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Dark Room and A Boy in Winter 'Seiffert writes short, fast narratives about the big historical events that have shaped our time' The Times To be truly alive means having to make choices. To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love. Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers - forced labourers - fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall. The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands. Peace brings more soldiers - but English this time - and Red Cross staff officers. Ruth, on her first posting from London, is given charge of a refugee camp on the heathland, crowded with former forced labourers. As ever more keep arriving, she hears whispers, rumours of dark secrets about that snowy night. The townspeople close ranks, shutting their mouths and minds to the winter's events, but the town children are curious about the refugees on their doorstep, and Benno can't carry his secret alone.

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Reviews

I read Once the Deed is Done with great pleasure . . . Once again, Rachel Seiffert uncovers a little regarded realm of history, here exploring the pain and confusion of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War which hardly any novels have yet done. Great characters - taking us deep into the physical challenges and moral quandaries of the time -- Tim Pears I love that her novels take me to unexplored places and times. The forgotten period of the DP (Displaced People) camps in the immediate aftermath of the war has always fascinated me and she has brought to life a complex interaction between survivors on both sides with humanity and compassion -- Linda Grant The language has a directness that wouldn't be out of place in a children's story . . . it gives it, despite the historical precision, something of the feel of myth or fable. A complex, intelligent, deeply compassionate novel about the unglamorous aftermath of war. The research and imaginative recreation of the period is so impressive. A brilliant piece of story-telling - stubbornly hopeful. I hope it finds lots of readers. It deserves to and I think it will. -- Andrew Miller The structure is brilliant - the accounts are woven together, the different characters subtly appear in each other's stories, and we care about them ALL. The Heide is wonderfully evoked; I could smell the earth and the sand tracks and the inside of the shepherd's hut. Such a beautiful and powerful book. Emotional yet unsentimental, Rachel Seiffert's focus on a small, rural town in North Germany, from Burgermeister to abandoned baby unforgettably reminds us of the cost of war -- Lucy Jago It's a marvel, how Rachel Seiffert manages to choreograph such a cast of soldiers and citizens, nurses and prisoners, parents, siblings, and children, in all their displacements - geographical, emotional, and moral - in prose that is so lucid, so understated that this entire novel reverberates with the cataclysmic consequences of Germany's Final Solution in ways that only haunt the reader more and more deeply, long after its last page. Once the Deed is Done is an incredible work of art, of witness and it is an incredible act of love -- Paul Harding, Booker prize author of THIS OTHER EDEN Robert Seethaler, Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Doerr have played with the heroic narrative of resistance figures . . . few have surveyed this murky territory as well as the British author Rachel Seiffert. Seiffert is skilled at invoking characters stricken by conflicting loyalties to family and country, as well as between notions of justice and forgiveness . . . In its depiction of random violence and random kindness, Seiffert's book is humane and horribly believable. It is also a crime novel in the sense that To Kill a Mockingbird is a crime novel. One in which a whole community is culpable * Financial Times * Marvellous . . . Seiffert juggles a very large cast with immense skill in a wide-ranging novel that beautifully balances the tumultuous reach of history with the everyday concerns of ordinary people * Daily Mail *

Author Information

Rachel Seiffert is one of Virago's most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists. Her first book, The Dark Room, (2001) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and made into the feature film Lore. In 2003, she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2011 she received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Field Study, her collection of short stories published in 2004, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards (2007) third novel The Walk Home (2014), and fourth novel A Boy in Winter (2017), were all longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her books have been published in eighteen languages.

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