Berlin Shuffle

Reviews / Votes

Highlights the author's exceptional talent for capturing the human experience of the political and economic disarray felt in Germany during the interwar years... The tension is ratcheted up brilliantly... A cautionary tale for our times * FT * A cynical, funny account of down-and-out Berlin in the 1920s... lively... with a fittingly explosive conclusion * Guardian * A tragicomic novel of down-and-out Berliners... Makes you wonder what a stellar career he might have had if his vagabond life hadn't been cut so brutally short... Unflinchingly honest, yet deeply humane * New York Times * A story of misery, mayhem, madness and murder... The parallels with the present are frequently surprising... Presents a darkly funny anthropological study of what it is like to be one of the ordinary, little people trapped in an escalating social nightmare * Sunday Times * The exhumation of Boschwitz is one of the more pleasing literary stories of recent times... Propulsive, dramatic... Steeped in foreboding... One could imagine Powell and Pressburger adapting it into a wonderful movie -- Toby Lichtig * TLS * Chilling and vividly portrayed . . . This clear-eyed novel from Boschwitz (The Passenger), who died in 1942, excavates the resentments of a broad cast of German characters as the country slides toward fascism. . . The plot threads are seamlessly stitched together. . . Profound * Publishers Weekly * A welcome addition to Boschwitz's oeuvre. . . The book's greatest strength is showing, in day-to-day terms . . . an atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise. . . Many of the novel's concerns overlap with those of the present day * Kirkus Reviews * Praise for * The Passenger * Part John Buchan, part Franz Kafka and wholly riveting. It is also uncannily prescient [...] a gripping novel that plunges the reader into the gloom of Nazi Germany as the darkness was descending -- Jonathan Freedland * Guardian * There have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times, most notably Suite Francaise and Alone in Berlin. I'm not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of them * Sunday Times * Gripping and viscerally affecting * Telegraph * By turns claustrophobic, dizzying and symbolic, The Passenger is a work with sufficient pace to be a thriller, yet possessed of enough nuance and psychological depth to be of real literary weight * Spectator * A writer of great insight and talent * Financial Times * A riveting, noirish, intensely filmic portrait... a jewel of a rediscovery: At once a deeply satisfying novel and a vital historical document * Wall Street Journal * We owe a huge debt of thanks to Philip Boehm for his excellent translation and to Pushkin Press for championing such a talented writer. If he had survived the war, who knows what might have become of Boschwitz. His first two novels suggest he was an extraordinary talent in the making * Jewish Chronicle *