Title: All the Broken Places

Author: John Boyne

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Penguin

Rating: 5/5

Cover:

Summary:

From the author of the globally bestselling, multi-million-copy classic, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, comes its astonishing and powerful sequel.

Gretel Fernsby is a quiet woman leading a quiet life. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Germany seventy years ago or the dark post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, the commandant of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.

But when a young family moves into the apartment below her, Gretel can’t help but befriend their little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back painful memories. One night, she witnesses a violent argument between his parents, which threatens to disturb her hard-won peace.

For the second time in her life, Gretel is given the chance to save a young boy. To do so would allay her guilt, grief and remorse, but it will also force her to reveal her true identity.

Will she make a different choice this time, whatever the cost to herself?

Review:

I haven’t read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas for years and years but I remember how powerful and heart wrenching it is and I was curious as to how a sequel would work. Having now read All the Broken Places, I can say that the sequel is just as powerful and thought provoking as its predecessor. This is a book full of questions of morality, guilt and redemption. It is gripping, beautifully written and at times genuinely heartbreaking.

The book follows Gretel, the sister from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and her life after the war. She is not always a wholly likeable character, often brittle and certainly immensely damaged, and yet, I found her completely captivating and deeply compelling to follow. Her entire life has been overshadowed by the inescapable spectre of her family’s culpability in the holocaust and her guilt is constant and unrelenting. As an old woman, she finds herself in yet another traumatic situation and has to decide whether to act to protect a young boy in danger. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is tense, provocative, elegant and emotional, and will live in its readers heads for a long time to come.

★★★★★

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