News from Berlin

June 1941. Dutch diplomat Oscar Verschuur has been posted to neutral Switzerland. His family is spread across Europe. His wife Kate works as a nurse in London and their daughter Emma is living in Berlin with her husband Carl, a 'good' German who works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Briefly reunited with her father in a restaurant in Geneva, Emma drops a bombshell. A date and a codename, and the fate of nations is placed in Verschuur's hands: June 22, Barbarossa.

What should he do? Warn the world, or put his daughter's safety first? The Gestapo are watching them both. And with Stalin lulled by his alliance with Hitler, will anyone even listen?

Otto de Kat is fast gaining a reputation as one of Europe's sharpest and most lucid writers. News from Berlin, a book for all readers, a true page-turner driven by the pulse of a ticking clock, confirms him as a storyteller of subtly extravagant gifts.

Otto de Kat, born in 1946, lives and works as a publisher and novelist in Amsterdam. Man on the Move (MacLehose Press, 2009) was the winner of Holland's Halewijn Literature Prize. Ina Rilke is the prize-winning translator of books by Cees Nooteboom, W. F. Hermans, Erwin Mortier, Tessa de Loo, Dai Sijie, Margriet de Moor and Arthur Japin, among others.