Description

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A deceptively simple, emotionally powerful novella about a passionate friendship between two teenage boys that begins in Germany in 1932—under the shadow of Hitler's rise—and reverberates across the decades. A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition.

The romantic forested landscape of southwestern Germany in 1932 is the setting for the birth of a friendship that will haunt sixteen-year-old Hans Schwarz for the rest of his life. Hans is Jewish, the son of a middle-class doctor who is confident that the rise of the Nazis is only "a temporary illness" afflicting his beloved country.

Hans's newest classmate, Count Konradin von Hohenfels, is a dazzling young aristocrat whose glamorous mother keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dresser. Hans is immediately drawn to Konradin, and thrilled when a close bond forms between the two boys, forged by common interests that set them apart from their classmates. But their loyalties are soon tested in ways they could not have imagined.

Three decades later, from the vantage point of New York City, Hans once again confronts this life-shaping episode from his childhood, through a stunning revelation that he stumbles upon by chance. In its story of simple friendship undone by not-so-simple times, Reunion combines the explosive compression of a fable with the emotional depth of an epic novel many times its length.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

About the Author

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FRED UHLMAN was born in Stuttgart in 1901 and, as an anti-Nazi lawyer, was forced to leave in 1933 for England, where he became a well-known painter. He died in 1985.
 
About the Introducer: ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.

Praise For…

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“A daring miracle of narrative simplicity, [Reunion’s] end comes at you like a torch in a long tunnel. All is black, calamitously beyond words, and yet the eye, swiftly followed by the heart, is drawn to it: at last, a circle of light. Even if history cannot be rewritten, Uhlman tells us, a life may sometimes have more than one act.” —The Guardian

“Eloquent . . . Written in English by artist Fred Uhlman, who fled his homeland in 1933, Reunion is as perfect as it is powerful.” —The Irish Times
 
“Describes the deepest and most profound friendship between two boys . . . who are ultimately separated by history . . . Devastating.” —The Times (London)
 
“Still somehow Reunion remains a secret . . . . Word of mouth still passes it, like the discovery of a hidden gem, from astonished reader to reader.  So many readers know and love it as the classic it is and yet somehow it continues existence under the radar, a constant source of surprise to anyone happening across it for the first time.  But then, surprise is a core part of its perennial gift.  It's a novella whose slimness belies its heft.  Its impact is stunning.” —from the Introduction by Ali Smith