Details
- Book Title: All the Broken Places: A Novel
- Author: John Boyne
- Publication Date:
Description
Gretel Fernsby is ninety-one, comfortable, and very good at not talking about her past. She does not mention the Germany she fled as a girl, the lean post-war years in France, or the father whose job at an extermination camp made her childhood possible. When a young family moves into the flat below and Gretel befriends their small son, the arrangement she has kept intact for seventy years begins to give way. A violent argument overheard through the floorboards forces her to decide, at last, whether a life spent looking away can be answered for.
Author Bio
John Boyne is an Irish novelist from Dublin whose books have been published in dozens of languages. All the Broken Places returns to the world of his most widely read novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
What Readers Are Saying
- “Gretel’s story is one that we are all faced with at one time in our lives. What do you do when faced with a decision to help or turn a blind eye. Well-written and gripping.” — The Sullivans, five-star Amazon reviewer
- “It’s connected to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by the same author. Deals with a lot a very heavy subject… A real page turner with a surprise ending.” — Sandra Steinfeld, five-star Amazon reviewer
- “This is an engaging narrative spanning 9 decades written in a first person’s account of memorable post WW2 life. I found this book to be extremely well crafted.” — Dugald K. Winter, five-star Amazon reviewer
- Rated 4.6 out of 5 stars from more than 36,000 Amazon ratings.
Why We Think It Should Be Your Next Book
This is a rare sequel that outgrows the book it follows. Boyne is less interested in the spectacle of atrocity than in the long domestic afterlife of complicity — what a person does with sixty years of silence, and whether courage is still available to someone at ninety-one. The dual timeline is handled with real control, moving between wartime girlhood and a London apartment block without ever letting the present feel like filler. It earns its ending, which readers keep describing as a genuine surprise, and it does so without cheapening the history behind it.
❤️ Click here to buy All the Broken Places: A Novel by John Boyne on Amazon today. ❤️
Sources: Amazon product page and customer reviews for “All the Broken Places: A Novel” by John Boyne.