The Zookeeper's War

Description

In Berlin, who can you trust? A story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war ...It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo's director. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages. When the zoo's staff is drafted into the army, forced labourers are sent in as replacements. At first, Vera finds the idea abhorrent, but gradually she realises that the new workers are the zoo's only hope, and forms an unlikely bond with one of them. This is a city where a foreign accent is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours' dinner guests to the Gestapo. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted. The Zookeeper's War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism - and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.

Steven Conte's debut novel, The Zookeeper's War, won the inaugural Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and for the 2007 Christina Stead Award for Fiction. The novel was published in the UK and Ireland and translated into Spanish. For more information visit stevenconte.com

The Zookeeper's War is a striking first novel, imbued with the melancholy of a collapsing world-Nazi Germany in the last years of the Second World War. Vera, married to the keeper of the Berlin Zoo, struggles each day to survive Allied air raids and betrayal by neighbours. As characters negotiate intricate and destructive moral choices, the narrative drive is sustained to the satisfyingly uncertain ending.' Judges of the inaugural Prime Minster's Literary Awards