My favourite book of the year is actually from 1966: Emeric Pressburger’s The Glass Pearls, reissued this year in the excellent Faber Editions series. A proper thriller that keeps ramping up the tension until the very end, it tells the story of Karl Braun, a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight among the German émigrés of grimy, down-at-heel 1960s London. (It felt to me like precisely the same London as that of his long-time collaborator Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and I couldn’t help picturing the whole thing in that glorious Eastmancolor.) What makes the book so extraordinary though is that Pressburger – a Hungarian jew forced to flee Berlin in the 1930s, whose mother and many of his other relatives were murdered in Auschwitz – insists on the humanity of his monstrous protagonist, to the point of giving Braun some of his own backstory and characteristics (Kevin Macdonald, in his afterword, describes it as a kind of self-portrait); noticing where your sympathy lies while reading is a strange and unsettling experience.
Recommended by Gayle
‘The second of two novels written by Emeric Pressburger (of Britain's greatest ever film-making duo Powell and Pressburger), The Glass Pearls tells the story of Karl Braun, a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight among the German émigrés of grimy, down-at-heel 1960s London. A properly good thriller that keeps ramping up the tension until the very end.’
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