Once the Deed Is Done: 'A crime novel in the sense that TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a crime novel. One in which a whole community is culpable' Financial Times

The new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Dark Room and A Boy in Winter'This fine novel investigates the fate of displaced people in the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war' GUARDIAN'A complex, intelligent, deeply compassionate novel about the unglamorous aftermath of war . . . A brilliant piece of story-telling - stubbornly hopeful' ANDREW MILLER'Prose that is so lucid, so understated . . . this entire novel reverberates in ways that only haunt the reader more and more deeply, long after its last page' PAUL HARDING, Booker prize author of THIS OTHER EDENTo be truly alive means having to make choices.To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love. Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers - forced labourers - fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall.The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands