Lost: A Novel

An ordinary German family flees the advancing Russian armies in 1945, makes it to safety, starts over, painstakingly builds a new life in the postwar economic miracle. But in the refugee trek west, there was a victim, and that victim was their first born son, Arnold."Arnold isn't dead -- and he didn't starve" is what the little brother, the narrator of this story, is finally told by his parents when he is about 8 years old. "And now I began to understand that Arnold, my un-dead brother, was playing the leading role in the family and I was just a supporting actor." The search is on. Finding lost Arnold is his parent's dream. It is his little brother's nightmare.

Laconically distanced, often darkly and wickedly funny, here is the psychological and emotional rollercoaster that follows, as seen through the eyes of the youngest and most subversive person in the novel. A brilliant debut.