The Dark Room - Rachel Seiffert

"So what did you do in the war granddad?" "I murdered innocent people" History can be a very difficult subject to study due too the cruelness of human beings. It is difficult to comprehend the need for power and the sheer disregard for human life when committing genocide and trying to eliminate a whole group of people. The Jewish pogroms, the Highland Clearances, the Russian Gulags, Pol Pot and the Khmir Rouge, and the ethnic cleansing in the former coroutines of Yugoslavia. The list is endless and unlikely to end as there will always be power mad dictators. Above them all there is Hitler's regime and the Holocaust. I have ...  Read the complete review

I have to admit that I didn't approach this book with a good attitude. Not another bloody book about the War, I thought. If this year's Booker Prize judges short-list another war book, why I'll... Ahem, anyway... Rachel Seiffert is half German and half-Australian, she was bullied at school for being 'a Nazi' - rather unlikely seeing as she was born in Oxford in 1971. She wrote The Dark Room at Glasgow University, and now lives in Berlin. I put off reading this book for a long time. I was wrong to, because it's not what I expected at all. I've never read (almost) 400 pages quite so quickly - it's a real page-turner. ...  Read the complete review