A Meal in Winter (Paperback)

The most moving book I have read for a long time... Mingarelli's spare language is well suited to this luminous tale... he accomplishes a great deal The "banality of evil" finds beautiful, spare expression in this remarkable novella A masterpiece In its modest duration and economical prose, [this book] communicates more than most novels twice or three times its length... Praise is due to the translator, Sam Taylor, who appears to have weighed every word with supreme care, capturing the rhythm of a measured tread through the icy landscape... Brave and original... a masterpiece A sparse, beautiful and shocking novel that finds a more intimate route into the Holocaust Mingarelli's lapidary tale of awakened conscience unites historical events with the mood of a forest fairy-tale.... Brief, elegant, quietly lyrical yet driven by an inward fire Superb... The prose, elegantly translated by Sam Taylor, is full of rich visual descriptions... Enormously powerful and moving So memorable, so dark, so humane, it deserves to be read all over Europe. A masterpiece of empathy and horror One of the most quietly shattering novels I've read Deliver[s] a powerful punch Beautiful and disturbing... complex and surprising This strong and simple story packs a mighty punch Superb and devastating Chilling... From the first lines one is taken somewhere one would never wish to go, thanks to the clear, direct style, and the brilliant dialogue... impossible to put down The tragedy of the holocaust has rarely been better told than in this short tale, resonant with sadness and poetry This new novel by Mingarelli doesn't offer any miracles, but his story of wretched humanity revived around a piping hot dish shows once more the greatness of an incredibly unassuming author. Breathtaking The prose draws you in... Starkly realistic This is Mingarelli at his best. A story delivered with restraint, in hushed, sensitive prose. Perfect A gem of a novel, slight but so powerful Mingarelli find[s] new ways - oblique, lyrical, humane - to address the Nazi past Masterly and necessary... no intervening hand is noticeable in Sam Taylor's rendering of Mingarelli Devastating... Crisply translated by Sam Taylor It's a brave novelist who sets out to tell a Holocaust tale from the point of view of the would-be executioner but this is what Mingarelli does with great skill and admirable subtlety. A breathtaking lesson in brevity A fascinating, compelling vignette from Nazi-occupied Poland explored by a masterful storyteller A narrative of bleak genius 138 profound pages of horror and humanity I so recommend this brilliant, devastating, compelling WW2 novel Mingarelli's writing possesses a deceptive simplicity, and the novella proceeds so quietly that one is almost unprepared when the spectre of genocide intrudes upon it