Far to Go

By: Alison Pick

Narrated by: Lucy Brown

Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Far to Go is a powerful and profoundly moving story about one family's epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all, to save the life of a six-year-old boy. Czechoslovakia, 1939. Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, much like any other afluent Czech family, dote on their six-year-old son, Pepik, and enjoy a life of domestic comfort. Their nanny, Marta, could not adore Pepik more. But as rumours of the Nazi threat, and then the German troops, reach their corner of the Sudetenland, this charmed existence is turned on its head: for all that the Bauers barely consider themselves Jewish, their lives are now in danger.

Far to Go plunges us into the hearts of a family fleeing for their lives, and offered a desperate chance to save their child. Few novels have dealt with the story of the Kindertransport, and none with such insight into its complex legacy of hope, secrecy and loss.

A story about love, the painful choices it demands of us, and the way it endures, Far to Go is at once haunting and impossible to put down.

©2011 Alison Pick (P)2011 Headline Digital

Critic reviews

Masterly' (The Times)

'An extraordinary story' (Daily Mail)

'Emotionally powerful . . . A potential classic in the making' (Financial Times)

Not your avg holocaust book - great listen

I'm _definitely_ not a fan of holocaust or war books but this one is different. It's beautifully written (I believe the author is a poet too - and it shows in her writing style, although this book's not poetry at all). It's 2 stories in parallel, then and now; the now is a very clever blend of fact and fiction that leaves you wondering which aspects are fact and which fiction. A bit sad but not so sad that it depresses you... Indeed, I enjoyed it. The Czech-bourgeouis-annexed-by-Germans bit was interesting although I think "The Glass Room" by Simon Mawer does that aspect better. Overall, a lovely story about relationships in a time of war and they aftermath.