To Die in Spring

Winner of the HWA Sharpe Gold Crown for Best Historical Novel.

An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel of a friendship tragically interrupted by war, by German author Ralf Rothmann.

Walter Urban and Friedrich Fiete Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the Wars worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to volunteer for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances.

In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy.

To Die in Spring holds its own against Günter Grass and Erich Maria Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership – Guardian