ABOUT
THE BOOK

World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its past. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a pre-industrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned. The occupying American army has installed Ambras, a camp survivor, as governor of Moor, the town in which he worked as a slave labourer. Brave and lonely, Ambras chooses another loner, Bering, a village boy, and mechancial genius, to be his bodyguard. Bering enters a new world of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, of contact with the forbidden world outside. He meets Lily, who lives and hunts in the hills, the only other person welcomed by Ambras. When Bering’s new life begins to unravel as he falls prey to a strange eye disease, only Lily can find help and offer them all a possible future. Born in Austria in 1954, Christoph Ransmayr is the author of two previous novels. For The Dog King, he shared in 1996 with Salman Rushdie the European Aristeion Prize. He lives and works in a village near Dublin, Ireland.