British journalist Roger, stationed in Berlin, is tired of his job, namely writing articles on German issues, preferably Nazi related, for British newspapers. He feels he needs some time out and takes a sabbatical. His three-quarter German/one-quarter Italian girl-friend Lena, an interior designer, has decided to slow down a bit, too. Before he can think through the question of 'What now?', Lena flabbergasts him with the declaration that she's inherited a house. Roger knows instantly that she can only talk about Todi in Umbria but has to come round to the insight that it's in fact situated in the small town of Alt-Globnitz, eighty miles east of Berlin, in the Land ...  Read the complete review

Alarm bells should have sounded when I picked up Roger Boyes's "To Prussia with Love" in a bookstore and I thought to myself "this sounds a bit contrived". Call me naïve but when I browse the travel writing section in Waterstones, I tend to believe that those books are based on the writers' real life experiences. Not so, it seems; at least not if this book is anything to go by. It all starts off quite reasonably. Boyes is a British journalist living in Berlin and submitting stories about German life to his editor back in Blighty; rather fortuitously, just as he's yearning to do something different with his life, his German interior designer ...  Read the complete review