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.
Title: Once a Jailbird
Author: Hans Fallada
ISBN: 9780141196541
Binding:
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2012-06-07
Number of Pages: 496
Weight: 0.3403 kg
Fallada is a unique novelist, a writer of great sweetness and charm whom historical circumstances forced to take an interest in violent turmoil -- Philip Hensher * Independent *