Book description
On 20 July l944 Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death when an
assassin's bomb failed to kill him in his Eastern command, the Wolf's
Lair. The conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks,
and their executions were filmed. Among them was Axel von Gottberg.
Sixty years after his death, von Gottberg's close friend and now a
legendary Oxford professor, Elya Mendel, leaves a legacy of papers and
letters to a former student, Conrad Senior. Senior becomes obsessed
with what they reveal, but as he becomes more and more involved with
the past his own relationship with his wife Francine begins to fall apart.
The friendship between Mendel and von Gottberg is fatally
undermined by a romantic rivalry when two mysterious cousins, Rosamund
and Elizabeth, enter their lives in a richly imagined pre-war
Jerusalem. But it is finally destroyed when von Gottberg returns to
Germany. Mendel, who is Jewish, believes him to be a Nazi, and alerts
the Allies to his doubts about his friend, doubts which torment him
after von Gottberg is garrotted. Conrad is desperate to find a film
Hitler had made of these appalling executions, for reasons he himself
cannot fully understand.
The Song Before It Is Sung is a remarkable tapestry of passion,
ideas, frailty, courage and humanity, spanning Oxford in the 1930s,
pre-war Prussia and contemporary Britain. It is a profound novel that
addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and
it is the work of a master novelist.
Justin Cartwright's novels include the Booker-shortlisted In
Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading
the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning,
shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award. His previous
novel, The Promise of Happiness, won the 2005 Hawthornden Prize.
Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.
