Showing results by author "Anna Funder" in All Categories

At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. "I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”

2001, Sydney. Ruth Wesemann reçoit un mystérieux paquet qui va la replonger dans son passé, celui de l'entre-deux-guerres et du IIIe Reich. À l'époque, Ruth est une jeune photographe insouciante. En 1933, avec l'avènement d'Hitler, sa vie bascule : résistance, persécution, exil. Depuis la capitale anglaise, elle et son mari, Hans, tentent d'aider ceux qui, restés en Allemagne, s'opposent au Chancelier, et notamment sa cousine, Dora Fabian.