AustLit

'The Great War ends, as it began, with military blunders. A field ambulance station is being evacuated when a young soldier, blinded by gas during the fighting, joins the wrong queue. Gas blisters in his throat prevent him from telling anyone that his name is Adolf Hitler, private first-class, of the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry, Reserve Division, or that he is headed for Germany.

'The year is 1919. At Versailles, Australia has just signed a peace treaty destined to ruin Germany and create the conditions in which Nazism would thrive. Meanwhile, amid the celebrations at a remote fishing port in New South Wales, the steamer bringing Australian war heroes home also delivers the blinded Hitler. Here he meets Audrey McNeil, aspiring filmmaker and desparate opponent of her sister Sybil. Brief though his visit is, he changes Audrey's life.

'But is the stranger really who he claims to be?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Here the internationally renowned writer J.M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. ' (Publication summary)