Books like To die in spring by Ralf Rothmann

In the final spring of 1945, a nineteen‑year‑old German infantryman is conscripted from a dairy farm into the collapse of the Reich. After his father Walter dies, the boy discovers a handful of blank pages left to record the war. He attempts to reconstruct the father’s life and the brutal experiences of the army, drawing from what he remembers and inferring from the mythic emptiness that surrounds his story. The novel follows the father’s brief, turbulent service and his friend Friedrich Caroli’s desperate decision to desert, painting a chilling portrait of the psychological shock and moral confusion that flood the last days of World War II. Rothmann’s prose captures the grotesque beauty of those moments with an impressionistic, intimate voice that conveys the raw, unsettling reality of a young soldier’s final spring.

First publish date: 2017