Once the Deed Is Done
Regular price
€27.50
The new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Dark Room and A Boy in Winter
'Complex, intelligent, deeply compassionate . . . A brilliant piece of story-telling' ANDREW MILLER, Booker Prize-longlisted author of THE LAND IN WINTER
'This entire novel reverberates in ways that only haunt the reader more and more deeply, long after its last page' PAUL HARDING, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of THIS OTHER EDEN
'Searingly beautiful . . . powerful . . . Seiffert's writing beautifully captures this devastating moment of history' SPECTATOR
To be truly alive means having to make choices. To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love.
Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers - forced labourers - fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall. The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands.
Peace brings more soldiers - but English this time - and Red Cross staff officers. Ruth, on her first posting from London, is given charge of a refugee camp on the heathland, crowded with former forced labourers. As ever more keep arriving, she hears whispers, rumours of dark secrets about that snowy night.
The townspeople close ranks, shutting their mouths and minds to the winter's events, but the town children are curious about the refugees on their doorstep, and Benno can't carry his secret alone.
'Marvellous . . . a wide-ranging novel that beautifully balances the tumultuous reach of history with the everyday concerns of ordinary people' DAILY MAIL
'I read Once the Deed Is Done with great pleasure . . . Great characters taking us deep into the physical challenges and moral quandaries of the time' TIM PEARS, author of THE WEST COUNTRY trilogy
'Panoramic . . . this fine novel investigates the fate of displaced people in the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war' GUARDIAN
'The patron saint of this gripping novel is Bertolt Brecht. This is a fascinating novel by one of our very best writers' JEWISH CHRONICLE
Rachel Seiffert is one of Virago's most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists. Her first book, The Dark Room, (2001) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and made into the feature film Lore. In 2003, she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2011 she received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Field Study, her collection of short stories published in 2004, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards (2007) third novel The Walk Home (2014), and fourth novel A Boy in Winter (2017), were all longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her books have been published in eighteen languages.