Anglické roky – Gstrein Norbert (2019)

North Atlantic, July 2, 1940. The Arandora Star, a former luxury liner under the British flag, is sunk during its journey to Newfoundland. On board are over a thousand internees, including a prisoner whose identity is unclear. Fifty years later, a young woman learns about the ship's demise while tracing the footsteps of writer Gabriel Hirschfelder, who came from Austria and confessed before his death that he killed a man during the war. In the novel English Years by Norbert Gstrein, a partly detective story unfolds, set partly during World War II in Britain, which held men in internment camps whom it believed posed a danger, lumping together both Nazis and Jewish refugees, and partly several decades after the war's end, when the search for a hypothetical murder that was supposed to have occurred during the war is just beginning to develop. The quest for what happened is accompanied by questions about the possibility of discovering the truth. These questions are also linked to others: what creates human identity, what does Jewish identity mean, what is the nature of our human stories that arise through storytelling? The reader can approach English Years in several ways - as an exciting search for truth or equally...