AustLit

'This novel follows four participants with contrasting backgrounds through the nerve-racking first Nuremberg trial (1945-6) and the turbulence of the war-damaged, polyglot ‘trial community’ thrown together and dumped into a small, bombed-out city.

'One participant is a defendant and former Nazi top propagandist fighting for his life. The other three – a Jewish German-American prosecution interpreter, a British judge, and a German woman (one of the tribunal’s pioneering simultaneous interpreters) – play active roles in the trial and come to identify with its breathtaking ambition to set a judicial precedent that will deprive perpetrators everywhere of their impunity, in aid of a new world where human rights hold sway. Katerina, the simultaneous interpreter, is newly married to an Australian member of the British prosecution, but is also struggling to restore the decency and honour of her own nation after its profound corruption during the Nazi era. All four work in the daily glare of global press and radio attention. Their encounter discloses the trial’s long-term legacy in the development of an international rule of law.' (Publication summary)