All That I Am – Anna Funder

This is a novel based on real men and women who fled Germany in the early 1930s and spent years desperately trying to warn a blithe world about the danger of Hitler. Much of the action takes place in London and I was shocked at how active the Nazi henchmen were outside of Germany in this period. I knew nothing about the characters depicted, whose heroism cannot be doubted and, for me, inspire awe.

On a technical level, though, the book is flawed. Sentence for sentence it is fair, but characterisation gets a bit blurry and the overlapping narrators are insufficiently differentiated. I could also have done without the strand concerning life in contemporary Sydney which adds little.

As a work of literature, All That I Am is pretty good. As an act of remembrance, it is magnificent.