Once the Deed Is Done

Reviews / Votes

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 * The fine fifth novel from the German-British author Rachel Seiffert . . . [who] is drawn to small figures on a big canvas. Her subjects are the everyday casualties of 20th-century European history and the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war. Once the Deed Is Done stirs memories of the centrepiece tale from Seiffert's Booker-shortlisted debut, The Dark Room with its depiction of a people cast adrift, struggling to find a route home . . . Seiffert has cited Joseph Roth - that great chronicler of mittel-European dislocation - as a literary influence. She writes in a similar fashion . . . a direct approach serves the characters well, brings this straitened and provisional world to life and provides a bedrock of basic humanity. * Guardian * The patron saint of this gripping novel is Bertolt Brecht. This is a fascinating novel by one of our very best writers * Jewish Chronicle * Searingly beautiful . . . powerful . . . Seiffert's writing beautifully captures this devastating moment of history, full of pain and horror, shame, trauma and grief. But there is resilience, too * Spectator * Rachel Seiffert's outstanding novel is full of feeling but without sentimentality -- Judges of the Walter Scott Prize for Fiction