The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. What is the difference between
friendship and love? Or between neutrality and commitment? Gustav Perle grows up
in a small town in ‘neutral’ Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second
World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav's father has mysteriously died, and
his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him.
Gustav's childhood is spent in lonely isolation, his only toy a tin train with
painted passengers staring blankly from the carriage windows. As time goes on,
an intense friendship with a boy of his own age, Anton Zwiebel, begins to define
Gustav's life. Jewish and mercurial, a talented pianist tortured by nerves when
he has to play in public, Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably
his life and Gustav's are entwined. Fierce, astringent, profoundly tender, Rose
Tremain's beauÂtifully orchestrated novel asks the question, what does it do
to a person, or to a country, to pursue an eternal quest for neutrality, and
self-mastery, while all life's hopes and passions continually press upon the
borders and beat upon the gate.
Author Biography
Rose Tremain's besÂtselling novels have been published in thirty countries and
have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Whitbread
Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
(Sacred Country); Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rose Tremain
was made a CBE in 2007Â and was appointed Chancellor of the University of East
Anglia in 2013. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard
Holmes. www.rosetremain.co.uk
Shortlist, 2016Â Costa Novel Award