THE PENAL COLONY - SECOND HAND

A girl's escape from Nazi Germany.

The city Eva Bentheim once adored is no longer familiar. A swastika is emblazoned on the flag atop the City Hall. Teachers, family, and friends are beginning to disappear. Her father seems gone in a different way; he has become ill, fragile, and despondent as the Nazis gain power. When things get worse, Eva's mother desperately tries to obtain the proper papers for her family to leave the country. Then a horrible night of roundups occurs and Eva's father is taken away. A nocturnal search begins for someone who can help release him from the city jail. Eva's boyfriend, Arno, may have a way to save her father from deportation, but it soon becomes clear that their struggles have just begun. Exquisitely felt and written, Walk the Dark Streets resonates with the indomitability of the human spirit even as a loving family's attempts to stay together grow more and more hopeless.

A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: Julian Barnes’s first novel since his best-selling, Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending.

In 1936, Shostakovitch, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovitch reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children—and all who are still alive themselves hang in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for decades to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music.

Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovitch's career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant exploration of the meaning of art and its place in society.