“Simply astounding. . . .
The Kindly Ones
is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” —
Time
A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littell’s
has been called “a brilliant Holocaust novel. . . a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force,” (Michael Korda,
The Daily Beast
). Destined to join the pantheon of classic epics of war such as Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
and Vasily Grossman’s
Life and Fate
,
offers a profound and gripping experience of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust.
A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic,
is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.