Blame Hitler - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

Motoring with his family to the south-west of France, Thomas Somers is struck with a profoundly unsettling thought: by the end of the holiday he will be older than his father was when he died.
Thomas hates his job. He's plagued with mysterious pains in his abdomen. He drinks too much. Distances open up between him and his wife, even his children. And now this sudden disturbing realization. From boyhood he was driven to do better than his dad - above all as a rival for his mother's love, a rivalry riven with guilt. But he recognizes his father was a better man than he. So how can he, how dare he, win the last round of all and live longer?
Force-fed by French friends, Thomas finds his nights are filled with dream and memory of the man who became and remained a stranger on the day he joined up and disappeared for three years. Blame Hitler! Obsessed with Wellington (the father figure who never lets you down), Thomas leaves his family and arrives, in turmoil, on one of Wellington's battlefields in northern Spain. Here at last he comes to terms with his father's crippling past.
Blame Hitler remembers the men who fought in World War Two, who survived and carried the burden of intolerable traumas for the rest of their lives. It is a comic, tragic, tender novel in which the continuities and discontinuities of domestic life are entwined with history at the sharp end.

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