To Die in Spring

Winner of the HWA Sharpe Gold Crown for Best Historical Novel.An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel of a friendship tragically interrupted by war, by German author Ralf Rothmann.Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances.In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy.'To Die in Spring holds its own against Günter Grass and Erich Maria Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership' – Guardian

To Die in Spring holds its own against Günter Grass and Erich Maria Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership., A Bosch-like vision of hell... The horror of war and the deep damage it does to people... is not always handled as well, or as powerfully, as this., A wonderful, precise, very moving novel., A remarkable and memorable book, about the nastiness, fear, dirt and brutality of war . . . Few novels, in any language, have conveyed them better., Yes, you’ve already read Remarque, but you should read this one because it’s not just the story of wartime trauma, but also the story of how that trauma affects the future. Walter Urban and his friend Friedrich Caroli are just 17 years old when they’re drafted from their dairy-farm duties into the trenches. Today, right now, we all need to read the chilling section in which very young men are hectored into military service.

Ralf Rothmann is a German novelist, poet, and dramatist. To Die in Spring is his eighth novel, but the first to be published in the UK.