All The Broken Places

 By: John Boyne

Location: FIC BOY

Genre: Historical Fiction, Boy in Striped Pyjamas Number 2!!!

“I told myself that none of it had been my fault, that I had been just a child, but there was that small part of my brain that asked me, if I was entirely innocent, then why was I living under an assumed name?”

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past.

Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget.

Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago. Back then, her complicity dishonoured her life, but to interfere now could risk revealing the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting.

All the Broken Places is John Boyne's masterful sequel to his classic bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, taking a character from that novel on a journey to a place she never goes - the past. Through her story, he explores the aftermath of the war and the effects of a lifetime of guilt

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby is a strong, complex, and memorable character. Her story moves back and forth in time between Europe 1946 and London almost 80 years later. What made this different than most other HF novels is that the book doesn’t really focus on the war itself but is more an exploration of the emotional aftermath of war. The main question being - If you do nothing to prevent evil, are you just as bad as the evildoers? And at what point do you become culpable?