THE LIST
THE LIST, 2011
published by Thomas Dunne, St. Martin’s Press.
London, October 1945. Austrian refugees Georg and Edith await the birth of their first child. Yet how can they celebrate when every day brings news of another relative or friend murdered in the Holocaust? Their struggle to rebuild their lives is further threatened by growing anti-semitism in London’s streets. Englishmen want to take homes and jobs from Jewish refugees and give them to returning servicemen.
Edith’s father is believed to have survived, and finding him rests on Georg’s shoulders. Then Georg learns of a plot by Palestinian Jews to assassinate Britain’s foreign minister. George must try to stop the murder, all the while navigating a city that wants to ‘eject the aliens.’
The List investigates an ignored and painful chapter in London’s history. The novel is both a breathless thriller of postwar sabotage and a heartrending and historically accurate portrait of an almost forgotten era. In this sensitive, deeply touching and impossible-to-forget story, Martin explores the themes of hope, prejudice, loss and love that make up the lives of all refugees everywhere.
REVIEWS
Martin Fletcher uses meticulous research and information from his own family history to examine the atmosphere after the second World War and how a young Austrian refugee couple tries to survive.
TODAY.com Books
Martin Fletcher brings the eye of a veteran journalist and his gift for story telling to this surprising and sad chapter of the history of World War II. The List will haunt and inspire you long after you turn the final page
Daniel Silva
…A powerful, affecting work.
A post-Holocaust novel that should be required reading wherever lessons about the plight of modern-day European Jews are taught
kirkusreviews.com
"The List” is an elegantly written and evocative story of Holocaust survivors and what they faced after the war. Martin, always the journalist, dug into his family’s past to give us a novel that is at once instructive, darkly comic and ultimately inspiring
Tom Brokaw
One Book, One Jewish Community chooses Fletcher's 'The List' Book of the Year
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, philly.com
...the novel’s warmth and humor will have readers rooting for the Fleischers and the neighbors who, in the wake of horror, become their new family.
publishersweekly.com
The lines are fascinatingly blurred in Martin Fletcher’s novel, “The List" (Thomas Dunne), which blends his parents’ experience as Austrian Jewish refugees in London with a tale of intrigue involving Lehi agents plotting the assassination of Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin in the waning days of World War II
Adam Dickter, thejewishweek.com
Extraordinary - a page-turning thriller that pulls you in and won’t let go
Jonathan Wilson, author of A Palestine Affair
Every scene and character in “The List” is somehow connected; creating a sense of a larger community even as the refugees feel trapped and isolated
Jspace Staff, jspace.com
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