The next Irish Times Book Club reading choice is The Undertaking by Audrey Magee. Shortlisted for last year's Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, it is an unlikely love story set in Nazi Germany during the second World War.
A soldier on the Russian Front marries a photograph of a woman he has never met. Hundreds of miles away in Berlin, the woman marries a photograph of the soldier. It is a contract of business rather than love. When the newlywed strangers finally meet, however, passion blossoms and they begin to imagine a life together under the bright promise of Nazi Germany. But as the tide of war turns and Allied enemies come ever closer, the couple find themselves facing the terrible consequences of being ordinary people stained with their small share of an extraordinary guilt...
Over the next few weeks, we shall publish an extract from the novel, an interview and Q&A with the author, and a podcast in which the author will discuss her book with a couple of Irish Times Book Club readers.
Audrey Magee worked for 12 years as a journalist and has written for, among others, The Times, The Irish Times, the Observer and Guardian. She studied German and French at University College Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University. She lives in Wicklow with her husband and three daughters.
In her 20s and 30s, she travelled extensively, first as a student, living in Germany and Australia, where she taught English; later as a journalist, covering, among many other issues, the war in Bosnia, child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the impact of Perestroika on Central Asia. She was Ireland Correspondent of The Times for six years. The Undertaking by Audrey Magee is published by Atlantic Books, priced £7.99.
