All That I Am

by Anna Funder

Overview

Award-winning author Anna Funder delivers an affecting and beautifully evocative debut novel about a group of young German exiles who risk their lives to awaken the world to the terrifying threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Based on real-life events and people, All That I Am brings to light the heroic, tragic, and true story of a small group of left-wing German social activists who mounted a fierce and cunning resistance from their perilous London exile, in a novel that fans of Suite Francaise, The Piano Teacher, and Atonement will find irresistible and unforgettable.

“An intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062077561
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/07/2012
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Anna Funder's international bestseller, Stasiland, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Her debut novel, All That I Am, has won many prizes, including the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award. Anna Funder lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and children.

What People are Saying About This

Rachel Cusk

“A remarkable story told with clarity and precision, along with moments of insight and literary grace.”

Colum McCann

“History, like hope, is not something to be solved, but to be carried. Anna Funder has written an essential novel about how we carry the bricks of history on our backs…”

Betsey Burton

“Like Hillary Mantel’s brilliant WOLF HALL, Funder’s new book is not just a novel or thriller, and is also far more than mere history.”

Ann Patchett

“In ALL THAT I AM, Anna Funder delivers a sweeping first novel that covers love and war, friendship and betrayal, and the bonds that define a life. It is a moving and ambitious work.”

Editorial Reviews

Funder follows the success of Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall with a debut novel “reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast.” Ruth Becker glimpses that beast outside her Berlin apartment in 1933, as her showy journalist husband, Hans, makes mojitos on the day that Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The heart of the novel, however, belongs to Ruth’s cousin Dora Fabian, leftist agitator, doomed idealist, and soul mate of playwright Ernst Toller. Ruth helps Dora hide Ernst’s writings as the Reichstag burns, and she flees with Hans the next day after being questioned about her Communist affiliations. Outside Germany, she works tirelessly for the cause, bringing Nazi preparations for war to the attention of the British. But her relationship with Hans, whose secret activities endanger everyone, crumbles. As the Holocaust begins, Ernst, in New York, relates Dora’s role in his life to a typist whose document reaches Ruth in Australia almost 60 years later. By alternating between Ernst and Ruth, Funder leaps through time with alacrity. She adds an integral perspective on a shopworn subject by invoking the lives of Nazi dissidents whose attempts to alert the world to the growing menace were ignored until it was too late. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[An] enthralling historical novel.

the Oprah Magazine O

Funder writes with grace and conviction about the intrusion of the political on the domestic and the thrill of falling in love over a cause.

New York Times Book Review

[An] enthralling historical novel.

O: the Oprah Magazine

"A strong and impressively humane novel…the subtlety of Anna Funder’s novel is in the elegance of her precise prose, and in her paintstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in extraordinary events…"

Time Magazines Literary Supplement (London)

"A seamless and powerful tale…Funder has successfully transformed the material into a narrative of individual endeavor and survival, which examines universal themes."

The Independenton Sunday

Dora is a passionately political woman. She is the thread that holds together her cousin Ruth, journalist Hans Wesseman, and Ernst Toller, a fellow activist and Dora's lover. The quartet flee Germany in the wake of Hitler's rise to power, but they refuse to be silent about the Nazi threat. Shifting back and forth in time through the framing device of Toller's autobiography, this debut novel by the author of Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a spiraling account of political activity and love during World War II. The social aspect of the politics, rather than the war, is the author's main focus in following Dora as she pulls Ruth and Toller along with her. VERDICT Inspired by the life of German Jewish activist Ruth Koplowitz, this beautiful tapestry of friendship and loyalty during one of history's darker times will appeal to fans of novels about World War II as well as those who enjoy biographies of figures from that period. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/11; the author got to know Koplowitz in her later years after she immigrated to Australia.—Ed.]—April Steenburgh, George F. Johnson Memorial Lib., Endwell, NY

Library Journal

Funder follows her critically acclaimed nonfiction debut (Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, 2003) with the novelized account of German activists who opposed Hitler before World War II. The author uses an unnecessary framing device, having two of the dissidents tell their sometimes-overlapping versions of events. In 2001 Australia, as her short-term memory fails along with her health, Ruth Becker remembers back 70 years to her early adulthood in Germany and England. In 1939 Manhattan, Ernst Toller, a world-renowned playwright and human-rights activist, holes up at the Mayflower Hotel where he dictates to his secretary the events that happened six years earlier. Both narrators are historical figures, as are almost all the "characters" in the book, despite a few name changes. Ruth and Ernst's paths cross in the 1920s. Toller, a decorated soldier during World War I, has been imprisoned for his pacifist activism. Among the pacifists and socialists working to gain his release is Ruth's older cousin Dora. While visiting Dora, 18-year-old Ruth falls deeply in love with journalist Hans Wesemann, whose courageous satirical articles make vicious fun of Hitler and his cronies. Ruth and Hans marry. When Toller leaves prison, where he has managed to write his well-loved plays, Dora becomes his secretary and passionate lover. Toller, scarred by his wartime and prison experience, suffers bouts of serious depression. He wants to marry Dora, but she is a committed feminist who refuses to be tied down. Life as an anti-fascist in late 1920s and early '30s Berlin is a heady mix of idealism, passion and drinking. Then the burning of the Reichstag occurs. Dora is arrested briefly, but it is Ernst the authorities want. Soon Ruth and Hans find themselves in London with Dora, Ernst and numerous other Germans trying to raise the alarm about Hitler. Some find adapting to expatriation harder than others, and one becomes a traitor to the cause. The disquieting historical facts entwined by themes of love and betrayal are powerful enough to make up for flat-footed storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews

…Funder writes with grace and conviction about the intrusion of the political on the domestic and the thrill of falling in love over a cause.
—The New York Times Book Review

John Williams

In ALL THAT I AM, Anna Funder delivers a sweeping first novel that covers love and war, friendship and betrayal, and the bonds that define a life. It is a moving and ambitious work.

Ann Patchett

Like Hillary Mantel’s brilliant WOLF HALL, Funder’s new book is not just a novel or thriller, and is also far more than mere history.

Betsey Burton

A remarkable story told with clarity and precision, along with moments of insight and literary grace.

Rachel Cusk

A remarkable story told with clarity and precision, along with moments of insight and literary grace.

Rachel Cusk

A brilliant narrative…Every part beautifully rendered and balanced…it works as a gripping spy novel…Funder’s prose raises the book to a different level…This book is a wonder.

Jonathan Mirsky

History, like hope, is not something to be solved, but to be carried. Anna Funder has written an essential novel about how we carry the bricks of history on our backs…

Colum McCann

A bravura piece of storytelling-perfectly plotted, exactingly described…Funder has taken the raw material of truth and from it created a novel of real power and beauty.

Daily Telegraph (London)

The strengths of Funder’s writing are emotional and imaginative. In what she has to say about love, loss and betrayal there is profound truth.

The Times (London)

A strong and impressively humane novel…the subtlety of Anna Funder’s novel is in the elegance of her precise prose, and in her paintstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in extraordinary events…

Times Literary Supplement (London)

A brilliant narrative…Every part beautifully rendered and balanced…it works as a gripping spy novel…Funder’s prose raises the book to a different level…This book is a wonder.

The Spectator

A seamless and powerful tale…Funder has successfully transformed the material into a narrative of individual endeavor and survival, which examines universal themes.

The Independent on Sunday

Imaginative, compassionate and convincing…In her first novel, Funder combines her proven gift for re-creating the past with the fiction writer’s license to reveal emotional truth through artifice.

Wall Street Journal