John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, five for younger readers and a collection of short stories. His 2006 novel The Boy In the Striped Pajamas sold 9 million copies worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, theatre, ballet and opera. John has won three Irish Book Awards and many other international literary awards and his novels are published in over 50 languages. He lives in Dublin. With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialization, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study. Absolutely not. Children’s and young adult publishing is in the worst place it has been in my lifetime,” he says. So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community. The Boy In The Striped Pajamas”…..which was first published in 2006: a best selling popular international book of ‘fiction’. …a children’s fable about a boy whose father is a Commandant in the German army during WWII, under the regime of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. ….

A scene from the 2008 film adaptation of John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: He has tied the narrative threads he left dangling in that book with his latest release, All the Broken Places, the story of Bruno’s older sister Gretel. Now a widow in her 90s, Gretel is living in London’s Mayfair, nursing a small fortune and the poisonous secret of her death camp father. Her mother was a popular beauty until she became an alcoholic, and Gretel later enjoyed her own privilege of the power people confer on a pretty young woman. She could ask questions and flirt her way through any answers she didn’t want to give. A stark confrontation of evil, an examination of guilt and deflection. Boyne treads the finest of narrative lines with skill and grace and proves himself yet again to be among the world’s greatest storytellers.” When is a monster’s child culpable? Guilt and complicity are multifaceted. John Boyne is a maestro of historical fiction. You can’t prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel.” This is not literature. As a grown-up sequel to children’s trash, All the Broken Places serves two roles. First, to demonstrate that Boyne definitely did not think that the Germans were innocent, definitely knew they were “complicit” and “guilty” and that history is “complicated”, etc, thanks very much. Second, to serve as a sort of fan fiction for those peculiar adults who long for the comfort of a childhood favourite.Some 16 years ago, his novel aimed at younger readers, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, helped introduce a new generation to the Nazi machinery of death. We see Gretel hesitate at the line she drew in her youth, her determination to leave the past in the past, and her continued justification for making that decision. For how much is she responsible and for what should she feel guilty? Gretel’s smart, engaging and uncompromising voice draws the reader in deftly – at the beginning she feels like a cosy crime heroine, or the deliciously spiky narrator found in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. She spies on her wealthy new neighbours: a film producer, his wife and their small son, Henry. But it doesn’t stay cosy for long. Gretel and the film producer are both hiding very dark secrets indeed. The two circle each other warily, as Gretel considers how much she is prepared to do to save someone’s life without compromising her own safety.

I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”Through three levels of narrative, Gretel ties herself up in knots of guilt, shame and clan liability, grappling with the unresolved and unresolvable tragedy of her life: how can survivor guilt be coped with by someone who survived on the other side of the Auschwitz fence and the wrong side of history? Under an assumed name, Gretel tries to reinvent herself, but is haunted by her past wherever she goes. We witness her being violently humiliated in France and fatefully crossing paths with a childhood love interest – a Nazi soldier – in Australia, causing her to flee to London. Before she starts dating the man who becomes her husband, she dates his Jewish friend, who lost his family in Treblinka. When she confesses her identity, he tells her to burn in hell and takes off to America. Gretel has a breakdown when her son is nine, the age at which her brother died. She spends a year in a psychiatric ward without confessing the source of her trauma to a doctor. Of course, commercial publishing has always responded to reader trends, and these days can rush out similar novels as fast as high street fashion reproduces copycat catwalk looks. Boyne hopes today’s ambitious debut novels by young writers “can be retrieved once publishing becomes courageous once again”. David never knows about the daughter he conceived with Gretel. What do you think of Gretel’s decision not to tell him about her pregnancy? That’s why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.

Firstly I would like to thank netgalley, Random House publisher,And the wonderful author John Boyne. I was privileged ton read an advance copy of this novel, the sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas . John Boyne will seat us right next to Gretel as she shuffles the scenery of her youth in Berlin during World War II. She's twelve years old and the family has moved to Auschwitz in Poland where her father is a commandant of one of the Reich's most notorious extermination camps. The family maintains their home right on the other side of the camp. Family life ignores the element of horror and tragedy only so many feet away. John Boyne studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He is now the author of 21 books. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

I still think ‘Boy/Pyjamas’ is a good story, as long as one reads it as exactly that, a story of fiction. When Gretel and Kurt meet in Australia and talk about their lives since the war, Kurt says, “I don’t remember making any conscious decisions about my life. It was all laid out for me so young” (250). What do you think of that statement? When do young people gain a responsibility for their own lives? Gretel Fernsby will prove to be one of the most complicated characters in recent times. We'll meet her at the age of ninety-one living in the upscale section of Mayfair in London. She's been a widow for some time after the passing of her husband Edgar. But her son, Caden, wishes for his mother to sell her flat. After all, he's on his fourth marriage and could use the cash. Gretel refuses to even consider selling.