Marrow and Bone

A moving, darkly funny road trip novel about World War II, returning to one's birthplace, and coming to terms with tragedy.West Germany, 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall: Jonathan Fabrizius, a middle-aged erstwhile journalist, has a comfortable existence in Hamburg, bankrolled by his furniture-manufacturing uncle. He lives with his girlfriend Ulla, who collects artistic representations of torture, in a grand, decrepit, pre-war house that just by chance escaped annihilation by the Allied bombers. One day Jonathan receives a package in the mail from the Santubara Company, a luxury car company commissioning him to travel in their newest V8 model through the People's Republic of Poland and to write about the route for a car rally. Little does the marketing department that came up with this PR trip to the east know that their choice location is Jonathan's birthplace: for Jonathan is a war orphan from former East Prussia whose mother breathed her last fleeing the...