Jonathan Littell

It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping...a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come

An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever

Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising

A compelling and savage tale, with a cold dispassionate eye that never flinches from the raw reality of mass-murder... a serious attempt to describe the terrors of the Nazi regime

The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail

Nor is The Kindly Ones only a great work of history and reflection, but full of striking literary writing: consummate adagios of landscape painting; lovely images and observations...even touches of macabre humour...inescapably impressive

Its account of Nazi cruelty, chaos and callousness has never been surpassed in fiction... Unforgettable...magnificent

The force and cool detachment with which author Jonathan Littell describes the physical realities of war and mass murder are searing. He has spent years on his research and clings closely to the historical record but this fictional presentation brings the accounts horrifically alive

[It] provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil... the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction

The Kindly Ones has been hailed as the return of the great European realistic novel.

I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell's much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it...a magnificent achievement

An immense novel...The depth of detail is astounding and authentic

Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

Jonathan Littell veers between brilliance and bathos...

Grotesque, dismaying, chilling in its focus on the fine detail of barbarism, this epic of evil is also addictively readable

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned

Dr Max Aue is a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. He is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a former SS intelligence officer and cold-blooded assassin. He was an observer and then a participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, he was present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the overthrow of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin. His world was peopled by Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer and, of course, Hitler himself. 
 
Max is looking back at his life with cool-eyed precision; he is speaking out now to set the record straight.

Jonathan Littell

Praise for The Kindly Ones

It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping...a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades ...

An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly imp ...

Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising

It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping...a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades ...

An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly imp ...

Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising

It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping...a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades ...

An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly imp ...

Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising

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