Almost Like Spring

Alex Capus / Translated by John Brownjohn

As the Great Depression tightens its grip in Europe – and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow gain notoriety in Texas – a series of bank robberies make headlines in Switzerland. The thieves are stealing small sums from city banks and are unafraid to use force when faced with capture.

Meanwhile, a shop assistant in Basel encounters two mysterious yet charismatic men from Germany with a seemingly insatiable love for jazz. Day after day they come to see her, and though she never knows his real name, she is soon in love with one of them.

As the bleak rituals of Nazism permeate Swiss as well as German society, the two men’s lives become corrupted when a robbery takes a violent turn; yet the humanity of their relationships remains sharply juxtaposed against the savage cruelty of their crimes.

ALEX CAPUS ALEX CAPUS is the author of A Matter of TimeLeon & LouiseLife is GoodA Price to PaySkidoo, and Sailing by Starlight.

JOHN BROWNJOHN is an experienced and versatile literary translator with almost 200 books to his credit. His work has won him critical acclaim and numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (three times), the US PEN, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes and Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us.

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ISBN

9781908323330

Pages

149

£7.99