No Place to Lay One's Head

Resumen del libro

In 1921, Francoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - opens her first bookshop in Berlin. It is a dream come true. The dream lasts nearly two decades.

Then suddenly, it ends. It ends after police confiscations and the Night of Broken Glass, as Jewish shops and businesses are smashed to pieces. It ends when no one protests.

So Francoise flees to France, just weeks before war breaks out. In Paris, on the wireless and in the newspapers, horror has made itself at home. When the city is bombed, Francoise seeks refuge in Avignon, then Nice.

She fears she may never see her family again. Nice is awash with refugees and terrible suffering; children are torn from their parents; mothers throw themselves under buses. Horrified by what she sees, Francoise goes into hiding.

She survives only because strangers risk their lives to protect her. Set against the romantic landscapes of Southern France, No Place to Lay One's Head is a heartbreaking tale of human cruelty and unending kindness; of a woman whose lust for life refuses to leave her, even in her darkest hours.

Biografía del autor

Vinculado al mundo del libro, la comunicación y la literatura desde 1980, ha sido traductor, crítico literario, articulista en prensa y editor. Como poeta, destacan sus libros Fortuna (1993), Las cenizas del paraíso y otros poemas (1997), Travesía (2000) y Te adoro Kafka (2006). Ha publicado los ensayos narrativos Privado paraíso (1988), Un fin de siglo (1989), Habitaciones irreales (1999), Londres/ Edimburgo (2000) y Contra la República Perfecta (2007), y el volumen de cuentos La ruta de Waterloo (2008). Sus novelas hasta la fecha son Los episodios capitales de Osvaldo Mendoza (1989), Mampaso (1990), Los días rusos (1996), Café Hugo (1999; 2007), Lobo (2000), El comprador de aniversarios (2003; Seix Barral, 2008), con la que fue ganador del Premio Dulce Chacón, y Autómata (2006), Premio de la Crítica de Castilla y León y de la Crítica de Euskadi, ambos en 2007. Algunas de sus novelas se han traducido a varios idiomas. Colabora habitualmente en el diario El País.