Book description
For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping
his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco - and dreaming of
the day of his release.
Then he gets out.
As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a
job and even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he
becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation and deceit, and with
one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making...
Hans Fallada's dark and moving 1934 novel brilliantly describes a
seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives and violent deeds, showing
how our actions always catch up with us.
Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the
twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf
Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most
famous works include the novels
Little Man, What Now?
and
The Drinker
. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in
Berlin.
