German Fantasia Av Philippe Claudel

<p>A deserting soldier treks through the torn-up countryside and abandoned villages, trying to distance himself from the atrocities of war.<br>An elderly man sits beneath lime trees, remembering his first sexual encounter one summer night with a female stranger who whispered another man''s name.<br>A young woman takes up a job in a care home, spending monotonous days scrubbing floors and yearning to dance at the local nightclub.<br>The artist Franz Marc lives on in an imagined life as a patient at an asylum, before falling victim to Hitler''s policy of <i>Gnadentod</i>.<br>Finally, a young Jewish girl, the life she once knew destroyed, holds her memories close as she finds refuge in wreckage of her homeland.<br><br>And throughout there is the shadowy presence of Viktor - one man or many? A looming figure in Germany''s own reckoning with its past.<br><br>Through these five interconnected stories, Philippe Claudel reflects on Germany''s complex history and the experiences of its people,