Melville House Publishing | Wolf Among Wolves

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Wolf Among Wolves

Hans Fallada

Another intense, sprawling, historic saga from Hans Fallada in the style of the hugely successful Every Man Dies Alone

Wolf Among Wolves is a sprawling saga of the collapse of a culture--its economy and government--and the common man's struggle to survive it all. Set in Weimar Germany soon after Germany's catastrophic loss of World War I, the story follows a young gambler who loses all in Berlin, then flees the chaotic city, where worthless money and shortages are causing pandemonium. Once in the countryside, however, he finds a defeated German army that has deamped there to foment insurrection. Somehow, amidst it all, he finds romance--it's The Year of Living Dangerously in a European setting.

Fast-moving as a thriller, fascinating as the best historical fiction, and with lyrical prose that packs a powerful emotional punch, Wolf Among Wolves is the equal of Fallada's acclaimed Every Man Dies Alone as an immensely absorbing work of important literature.

PRESS AND REVIEWS

"The ideal summer read."

—Katherine Powers, The Boston Globe Link

"An unmissably brilliant portrait of Berlin before the Nazis."

—The Times of London

"His most ambitious novel... deeply moving... he has evoked more than one can bear, but not more than it is necessary to learn, to keep and to understand."

—Alfred Kazin, The New York Times

"Fallada handles [the characters] not morbidly but with a Hogarthian exuberance and a tough humor, infusing into even those dying spirits the life of his copious imagination... Fallada's best book."

—The New Yorker (1938)

"Fallada can be seen as a hero, a writer-hero who survived just long enough to strike back at his oppressors."

—Alan Furst

"Fallada deserves high praise for having reported realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life."

—Herman Hesse

"Out of the multitude of episodes and a large cast of characters, the picture of post-War Germany during the terror of the inflation period, comes into reality, as in almost no other book we have had... A human document--and a moving picture of a Germany gone mad."

—Kirkus Reviews

“What other living German novelist shares with Fallada the power to grip the reader on the first page and hold him unremittingly through 1100 more?"

—Bayard Q. Morgan, World Literature Today (1938)

PRAISE FOR EVERY MAN DIES ALONE

"A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred… Rescued from the grave, from decades of forgetting…[Every Man Dies Alone] testifies to the lasting value of an intact, if battered, conscience…In a publishing hat trick, Melville House allows English-language readers to sample Fallada’s vertiginous variety…[and] the keen vision of a troubled man in troubled times, with more breadth, detail and understanding…than most other chroniclers of the era have delivered. To read Every Man Dies Alone, Fallada’s testament to the darkest years of the 20th century, is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers in your ear: “This is how it was. This is what happened."

—The New York Times Book Review Link

"Has the suspense of a John le Carré novel, and offers a visceral, chilling portrait..."

—The New Yorker Link

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Before World War II, Hans Fallada's novels such as Little Man, What Now? were international best sellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. But Fallada opted to stay in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and eventually had a nervous breakdown under pressure to write anti-Semitic books. He secretly wrote The Drinker while in a Nazi insane asylum, and composed his anti-fascist novel Every Man Dies Alone just after the war, dying before its publication in 1947.