The Breaking of Eggs [Hardcover]

Surprisingly warm and very witty (STYLIST )

"fluent, unusual (Lesley Chamberlain TLS )

An ambitious, powerful and funny work, taking the reader through 20th-centruy history and the human psyche (THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE )

A panoramic debut about love and loss, people and politics, THE BREAKING OF EGGS announces a major new talent

'You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' The apologists of Josef Stalin Feliks Zhukovski, a Pole in Paris, is a hangover from another age - a man who chose politics over people and ideas over love. His life's work is a travel guide to the old Eastern bloc; his personal life a series of failures. Unfortunately for Feliks, it's 1991. Communism has collapsed, East Germany isn't the economic miracle he wants it to be, and at 61, his travel-writing days are numbered. Feliks makes the shock decision to sell his guide to an American firm, and sets in motion a life-changing chain of events. He will meet a brother he hasn't seen in fifty years, learn the horrifying truth about the mother he thought abandoned him, and get a second chance with a long-lost love. But after fifty years of misunderstandings and delusions, can he start his life afresh? From the boulevards of Paris to the ghettos of wartime Poland, via Midwest America and the Berlin Wall, THE BREAKING OF EGGS chronicles the extraordinary journey of a lonely man who discovers it needn't have been so. As thought-provoking as it is moving, the novel casts an unflinching gaze on the human cost of a century of wars, in a voice that never loses its humour or uplifting power.

Jim Powell was born in London in 1949 and was educated at Cambridge. His first career was in advertising, becoming Managing Director of a major London agency. He then started a pottery, producing hand-painted tableware for leading stores. He was previously active in politics, contesting the 1987 Election and collaborating with former Foreign Secretary Francis Pym on his book The Politics of Consent. He lives in Northamptonshire.