From the Diary of a Snail

Description

'Actual factual elements are fused with imagined, created things, curt yet marvellously explosive observations- the result is a difficult, dynamic book, like no other... certainly an event in the reader's life and possibly in literature's history' - Sunday Times Probably the most autobiographical of his novels, From the Diary of a Snail balances the agonising history of the persecuted Danzig Jews with an account of Grass's political campaigning with Willie Brandt. Underlying all is the snail, the central symbol that is both model and a parody of social progress, and a mysterious metaphor for political reform. From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of The Tin Drum.

Gunter Grass (1927-2015) was Germany's most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass's first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

A pungent stew of a book using every ingredient to hand: nourishing but full of strange, grisly lumps and bitter flavours * Guardian * Grass is one of the master fabulists or our age and perhaps its supreme dramatist of metaphor * The Times * Shrewd, moving and funny * New Statesman * Grass is one of the few great writers in Europe today * Daily Telegraph *