In the immediate aftermath of the last war I spent most of a vacation at an international summer school for students at Göttingen university. Robert Edric’s new novel is set in the same part of Germany, a year or two earlier. Every- thing described — the ravages of the war, the camp of primitive huts for displaced persons, the municipal officials attempting to ingratiate themselves with the officers of the Control Commission, the fraternisation between lonely soldiers and women desperate for even everyday necessities, the black-market dealings often involving army personnel — coincides so precisely with what I remember that for a moment I wondered if Edric might not have been on the scene at about the same time. Then I realised that he had not even been born until a decade later.
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