From Monika Helfer's award-winning internationally bestselling wartime trilogy based on her
own family. Translated into English for the first time. ?We called him Vati Dad. Not Father
not Papa. That's what he wanted. He thought it sounded modern. He wanted to present himself to
us and through us as a man in tune with the modern age. Though he seemed to come from
nowhere.' Josef was an illegitimate child a charity case from Salzburg schooled by a
benefactor. He was drafted to fight in the Second World War while still at school and sent to
Russia returning with only one leg. He married his nurse and brought his family to the high
idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps where he took a position as manager of a home for injured
soldiers a strangely suspended deeply isolated place with a remarkable library. He was a man
of many mysteries. To his daughter Monika none was greater than his obsession with these
cloistered crumbling books his great treasure and secret amidst a country barrelling away
from the memory of war. Beautifully written restrained and memorable Library for the
War-Wounded turns a real life into great literature by confronting the universal question: Who
are our parents really?
