This is a book about the lives of two ordinary people who meant a great deal to the author but, of course, mean nothing to us — until the author has introduced them. They lived in horrible times, and had to make the kinds of hard decisions that the rest of us treat as parlour games. Most of the hard decisions dealt, sadly, with hate: Who are you allowed to hate? Can you be in love with a person you ought to hate? Should you help people you hate? Should you hate people who don't help people you love? For the most part these are 'post-war' questions, as this memoir is largely a post-war memoir. Perhaps this is therefore a good book to read alongside comparable accounts, like Primo Levi's The Reawakening or even Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Vikram Seth’s work is always a surprise. Whether it’s a travel memoir, a book-length poem, or a brilliant epic of Indian life, he is bound to be investigating something new.

And this book is no exception. Seth’s memoir focuses little on himself, mostly on his aunt and uncle. Shanti Uncle was an Indian dentist, trained in Germany but later an officer for the English forces during WWII. Aunty Henny was a German Jew, a dear friend during Shanti’s student days and only his wife many years later, after she fled the Nazis and settled in England.

Seth’s treatment of his beloved relatives, their heartbreaking trials and the intense disappointments of their lives is both gentle and honest. It is a story that investigates race, nationality, war and family, and clearly a book that has taken Seth himself on a difficult personal journey. Traveling with him, the reader is invited to look at issues both historical and contemporary, but always within the compassionate frame of an intimate family portrait. ( )

Intimate biography of Seth's great aunt and uncle. The uncle is an indian-born dentist who studied in Germany where he met, fell in love with, and eventually married a Jewish-German girl in the shadow of the Nazi parties. Very sad book at times, but gives a personal insight into the horror of those events. In many ways a study of privation, struggle and triumph by two exception people as representatives of the greatest generation. ( )

Vikram Seth's memoir of the lives of his uncle and aunt, with whom he lived, with on and off, during his school years in England. His uncle, a dentist who served in WWII, and his aunt, who lost her mother and sister during the Holocaust, have loving marriage and interesting back story which Seth only investigates many years later. ( )

Somewhat biased but very interesting perspective of Berlin after WWII. Comments concerning Israel incorrect. I would have liked to ask the author where he would like the Jews to live? Anti-sematism and killing of Jewish people did not begin in Hitler's Germany.