All The Broken Places
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4.6 • 28 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Brought to you by Penguin.
1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past.
Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget.
Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago. Back then, her complicity dishonoured her life, but to interfere now could risk revealing the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting.
All the Broken Places is John Boyne's masterful sequel to his classic bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, taking a character from that novel on a journey to a place she never goes - the past. Through her story, he explores the aftermath of the war and the effects of a lifetime of guilt.
© John Boyne 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
John Boyne reflects on the lasting toll of personal choices and guilt in this poignant sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Almost 80 years after the events of that book, Gretel Fernsby is now a widowed nonagenarian living in London. She largely keeps to herself, but a chance friendship with a nine-year-old boy sends her mind back to her past in Paris, Sydney and Auschwitz. There are notable parallels with the earlier book, as Gretel grapples with losing her younger brother all those decades before. Another touching moral fable, All the Broken Places is about how it’s never too late to make things right.
