News from Berlin
ABOUT
THE BOOK
June 1941. Dutch diplomat Oscar Verschuur has been posted to neutral Switzerland. His family is spread across Europe. His wife Kate works as a nurse in London and their daughter Emma is living in Berlin with her husband Carl, a ‘good’ German who works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Briefly reunited with her father in a restaurant in Geneva, Emma drops a bombshell. A date and a codename, and the fate of nations is placed in Verschuur’s hands: June 22, Barbarossa.
What should he do? Warn the world, or put his daughter’s safety first? The Gestapo are watching them both. And with Stalin lulled by his alliance with Hitler, will anyone even listen?
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Ina
Rilke
Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.
Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.
Writers she has translated include Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, Hella Haasse, W. F. Hermans, Arthur Japin, Erwin Mortier, Multatuli, Cees Nooteboom, Connie Palmen, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. Rilke has won the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize. She has also been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Book Award.
Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.
Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.
Writers she has translated include Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, Hella Haasse, W. F. Hermans, Arthur Japin, Erwin Mortier, Multatuli, Cees Nooteboom, Connie Palmen, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. Rilke has won the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize. She has also been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Book Award.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Gripping novel about the almost impossible decisions a Dutch diplomate in Bern has to make in the Second World War.