The Second Son: A Berlin Trilogy
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.05
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Second Son for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.05, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
On the Eve of Hitler's Olympics, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner is forced out of the Kriminalpolizei because he is a half Jew. Hoffner is not surprised given the rise of Nazism, and anyway his focus is elsewhere. His son Georg is missing in Spain, swept up in the sudden outbreak of the civil war. He has already lost Sascha, his elder son, to the Nazi regime. But Georg is not what he appears to be, and when Hoffner discovers this, he is determined to save the one son he can. The Second Son is the final installment in Jonathan Rabb's Berlin trilogy, set between the two world wars. Now, nearly ten years after the events of Shadow and Light, Hoffner finds himself tossed into the chaos that is Spain - where he quickly meets anarchists, Soviet and British secret agents, and a female doctor called Mila Pera - as he follows a trail of clues left by Georg. Rabb delivers another brilliant atmospheric work. On Rosa: "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and Andre Malraux." Harper's On Shadow and Light (2009), "brilliantly plotted narrative." Washington Post
About the Author
Jonathan Rabb lives in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife and their two children.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Second Son concludes the trilogy whose predecessors were Rosa and Shadow and Light, Jonathan Rabb's dark and foreboding thrillers set in the troubled first three decades of the twentieth century in Germany. Rabb is a rare writer, for he has a scientist's eye for detail, combined with a poet's insights and a born story teller's originality.
The Second Son features once more the main protagonist of the previous two tales, Nikolai Hoffner, the veteran and once highly regarded Berlin policeman with a Jewish mother, who is now persona non grata with the Nazified police force due to his ancestry. Hoffner decides to journey to Spain on the trail of his son Georg who has disappeared in that country at the start of the civil war.
Hoffner suffers the rare pain of having one son, Sascha, who is a convinced Nazi and from whom he is completely estranged, and Georg who has embraced his Jewish heritage and married into a Jewish family. On his travels through Spain Hoffner's courage, strength and ingenuity are tested to the limit and his journey is full of unexpected twists and turns, as well as enormous emotional upheaval.
Rabb demonstrated in Rosa and Shadow and Light an extraordinary ability to conjure the mood of Weimar Berlin, and here he proves that his skills as a story teller are not restricted to that city for he brings civil war Spain alive in vibrant colour and a wide variety of characters both predictable and unpredictable.
Jonathan Rabb is clearly at the height of his powers as a story teller and his next novel will be eagerly awaited.
The Second Son features once more the main protagonist of the previous two tales, Nikolai Hoffner, the veteran and once highly regarded Berlin policeman with a Jewish mother, who is now persona non grata with the Nazified police force due to his ancestry. Hoffner decides to journey to Spain on the trail of his son Georg who has disappeared in that country at the start of the civil war.
Hoffner suffers the rare pain of having one son, Sascha, who is a convinced Nazi and from whom he is completely estranged, and Georg who has embraced his Jewish heritage and married into a Jewish family. On his travels through Spain Hoffner's courage, strength and ingenuity are tested to the limit and his journey is full of unexpected twists and turns, as well as enormous emotional upheaval.
Rabb demonstrated in Rosa and Shadow and Light an extraordinary ability to conjure the mood of Weimar Berlin, and here he proves that his skills as a story teller are not restricted to that city for he brings civil war Spain alive in vibrant colour and a wide variety of characters both predictable and unpredictable.
Jonathan Rabb is clearly at the height of his powers as a story teller and his next novel will be eagerly awaited.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a fitting climax to an extraordinary trilogy that vividly captures what went wrong in Europe between the World Wars. Through the eyes of a hard-bitten police inspector, Nikolai Hoffner, we have seen the Berlin of 1919 ("Rosa")and 1927 ("Shadow and Light") come to life in both vibrant and sordid detail. Now, in 1936, Hoffner has lost his job because of his Jewish ancestry, but all his old detecting skills become necessary again when his son disappears from view while on assignment as a news photographer in Spain. Hoffner travels across Spain as the Civil War erupts, accompanied by a woman doctor from Barcelona who is looking for her brother amidst the chaos of these early days of bloody struggle. Rabb gives us romance, a penetrating look at the grim realities of war, and the mounting excitement of a pursuit across Spain, with a shocking climax, in this powerful novel, which this reader was unable to put down.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is the best of Rabb's trilogy. The protagonists are well drawn but, as with the other books, it is the politics and political machinations that make the story really interesting.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Greek tragedy acted out in the Spanish Civil War period
"The Second Son" completes Jonathon Raab's Berlin trilogy, taking protagonist Police Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, to 1936 Spain in search of his missing younger son, Georg. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Blue in Washington
Second Son
A good book but not quite as sharp as the first two in my opinion. If you have read and enjoyed the first two episodes however you can't avoid seeing the story out. Read more
Published 9 months ago by anicoll5
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
