The Undertaking: A Novel

Audrey Magee

Set 2014 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

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A “deeply impressive . . . devastating but quite stunning” novel about doomed love and ambition in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
 
Set during World War II amid the trenches of the eastern front and the turmoil of Berlin under the Third Reich, The Undertaking intertwines the lives of two German strangers entering into a proxy marriage of convenience, self-interest, and of ideology.
 
Peter Faber is a soldier desperate to escape the madness of war if only by a three-week honeymoon leave. His new wife is Katharine Spinell, a resourceful young woman from Berlin who anticipates the likelihood of a widow’s pension should Peter die in battle. When they finally meet there is an attraction as unexpected as it is intense. But as Peter returns to Stalingrad, and as Katherine ruthlessly works her way into Nazi high society, the tides of war change. So do Peter and Katharine’s fates and fortunes, in this “bold, honest novel about Nazi greed and moral blankness . . . and the small people who are inseparably part of a great ravagement” (The Guardian).
 
Finalist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Undertaking is “one of the most riveting accounts of love in time of war that this reviewer has ever read” (Library Journal (starred review)—“a violent, elegant, unsentimental journey through hell and halfway back” (Chris Cleave, New York Times–bestselling author of Everyone Brave is Forgiven).

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Audrey Magee worked for twelve years as a journalist and has written for, among others, the Times, the Irish Times, and the Guardian. She studied German and French at University College Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University. She lives in Wicklow with her husband and three daughters. The Undertaking is her first novel.