The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero

This is a beautiful book, a masterpiece of brevity and depth New European

This tense novella builds to a final reckoning The Times

In October 1944, a thirteen-year-old girl arrives in a tiny farming community in Lower Austria, at some distance from the main theatre of war. She remembers very little about how she got there, it seems she has suffered trauma from bombardment. One night a few months later, a young, emaciated Russian appears, a deserter from forced labour in the east. He has nothing with him but a canvas roll, which he guards like a hawk. Their burgeoning friendship is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of a group of Wehrmacht soldiers in retreat, who commandeer the farm.

Paulus Hochgatterer’s intensely atmospheric, resonant novel is like a painting in itself, a beautiful observation of small shifts from apathy in a community not directly affected by the war, but exhausted by it nonetheless; individual acts of moral bravery which to some extent have the power to change the course of history.

Longlisted for the Austrian Book Prize 2017, this subtle, evocative novella will appeal to readers of Hubert Mingarelli’s A MEAL IN WINTER and Jenny Erpenbeck’s THE END OF DAYS.

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Jamie Bulloch is the translator of novels by Timur Vermes, Steven Uhly, F. C. Delius, Daniela Krien, Jorg Fauser, Martin Suter, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Oliver Bottini. For his translation of Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast he was the winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize.

With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union