All That I Am

Reviews

The strengths of Funder's writing are emotional and imaginative.In what she has to say about love, loss and betrayal there is profound truth Brilliant and necessary ... Here is someone who knows how to tell the truth A journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting A terrific act of life-giving to people who have lacked not just a voice but an audience Anna Funder proved herself a first-rate reporter with Stasiland - now she appears as a compelling novelist in a dark story of German emigres in the 1930s, struggling to warn the indifferent English against the Nazis The subtlety of Anna Funder's novel is in the elegance of her precise prose, and in her painstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in extraordinary events...The result is a strong and impressively humane novel A superb novel that transcends its setting...This book is a wonder. Do, please, read it History, like hope, is not something to be solved, but to be carried. Anna Funder has written an essential novel about how we carry the bricks of history on our backs, and how we continually build new homes from the material of the past. All That I Am is an intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another. Funder breathes life into Kundera's aperçu that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting A seamless and powerful tale...the book is far more than "faction"; Funder has successfully transformed the material into a narrative of individual endeavour and survival, that examines universal human themes...Dora and Ruth, especially, convey a sense of truthfulness and decency that transcends their time and should inspire us, even now, to expose injustice and tyranny Expand reviews