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Three months in, Von Wächter is taken ill under mysterious circumstances. Two monks drop him off at the nearby Santo Spirito hospital, under a false identity. Four days later, he’s dead. He is the inhabitant of the family seat – “a vast, dilapidated, empty, magnificent castle” in Upper Austria bequeathed to him by his mother. He’s also the last defender of his father’s honour and, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Horst refuses to believe that his father was a criminal at all. Von Wächter evades capture, surviving as a fugitive for three years in the Austrian Alps Sixty years after the event, Otto’s youngest son, Horst von Wächter, is still haunted by his father’s death. He believes Otto was murdered in Rome in 1949. Sands is unflinching, though, where Horst cannot be. He pursues the details and we are left with the unsettling, discordant portrait of a man who is conceivably a passionate husband and devoted father, but irrefutably a war criminal with blood, including that of Sands’s own family members, on his hands.

Small talk? No, thanks. Homework? Pass. Silent Book Club is all about enjoying books, company, and beverages — without having to think of something smart to say. Founded in 2012 by a couple of friends who liked to read in companionable silence, Silent Book Club now has over 240 “chapters” (that’s a group) who gather across 30+ countries to read together in silence.

Multibuys

As well as phenomenal fiction, we also have children's books for all ages and interests. From learning to read, to bedtime stories, to books for older readers; the next book to steal your little one’s imagination and nurture their love of reading is just around the corner. Online at WHSmith you’ll find the classics that you know and love from your own childhood, such as Roald Dahl as well as fantastic new authors such as David Walliams, Jeff Kinney and Tom Fletcher. It’s treacherous terrain, but in Sands we have an incomparable guide who finds a kind of redemption on every road of the human experience, though never at the expense of responsibility or truth. The outcome is a feat of exhilarating storytelling – gripping, gratifying and morally robust. Despite this age of isolation, the New York Public Library has been strengthening its community of readers since April 2020, when it teamed up with US radio station WNYC to launch its online book club. Sometimes, the price point of popular new-releases (often the fodder of book clubs) can put off readers who would otherwise love to join. But all the chosen books for this virtual book club can be read for free through NYPL’s e-reader app, which makes it easy to read any eBook in your library’s collection. If you don’t have a library card, you can still browse thousands of public domain classics, and tune in to the author discussions that are presented as part of Get Lit — the book portion of WNYC's arts-and-culture show, All of It. All of their past shows — including interviews with Brit Bennett and Colson Whitehead — are also available for catch-up. Now, this book club is a vibrant online community with a beautiful aesthetic and over 130k members. The club has hosted guest recommendations from a stellar cast of artists, musicians, writers and directors; including Grayson Perry, who went for Praise of Shadows, Greta Gerwig, who gave The Argonauts her seal of approval, and Sally Rooney, who chose Daniel Deronda.

Though this book club is ideal for introverts, that’s not to say it isn’t social. Silent Book Club is all about community. They think it’s important to put down our phones and be “real, live, breathing-the-same-air social”. Sure, nobody’s forcing you to make small talk over a glass of wine, but you can sit with a book and a friend in a cafe, and if you want to chat about what you’re reading — go for it!Our Shared Shelf was founded in 2016 by actor Emma Watson as part of her work with UN women. The online book club focused on intersectional feminist literature, including must-read books like The Handmaid’s Tale and powerful memoirs like The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

Rebel Book Club is for bookworms and nonfiction junkies battling the curse of tsundoku — that’s Japanese for the growing pile of unread books next to your bed. They’re a fun, global community of curious minds looking to get maximum value from bad-ass nonfiction reads.An unlikely friendship develops as Horst looks to Sands, inheritor of his own and strangely interconnected family tragedy, to help him do the work that he cannot do alone: to exonerate his father’s soul. Horst shares everything: every letter, every diary, every photograph, bequeathed, along with this castle, by his mother, Charlotte. He urges Sands to get to the bottom of the mystery of his father’s untimely end. What is evil? The possibility, as we travel with Sands into the moral maze that he sets up is that we will come to see how a man’s capacity for love, not his crimes, constitutes the real measure of his soul. We discover recommendations for the best books to read in all sorts of places, whether it’s our bookworm friends, a Saturday morning spent browsing our favourite bookshop, the Richard & Judy Book Club, a new book-to-screen adaptation, or BookTok! The authors we find, the books we fall in love with and even the genres that we immerse ourselves in all have an impact and accompany us through life. A professor at UCL and renowned international barrister who has been engaged with human rights violations in Chile, Guantánamo Bay, Congo and Iraq, Sands grapples here with material left unresolved at the end of East West Street, where Von Wächter, though indicted in 1945 for mass murder, is the man who escapes justice, the one who gets away.

He was “against the racial theories”, he insists. “[He] didn’t see the Germans as supermen and all others as Untermenschen . He wanted to do something good, to get things moving.”Since 2017, Lez Book Club members have been meeting in London pubs to provide a space for queer women to come together and share LGBT books. But the pivot to virtual book clubs (and virtual everything else) has given founder Eleanore Pratoussy the opportunity to remove all physical boundaries from the group and open up this lit-loving community to queer and trans women, and nonbinary people, all around the world. If you’re looking for the benefits of a popular online book club, as well as the intimacy of a local group to join with all your friends, then search no further than the Poppy Loves Book Club. Run by Eva of Poppy Loves London, this women-only club serves as an umbrella community, joining together hundreds of local book clubs from all corners of the world. Books introduce us to new worlds, exciting characters and possibilities that ignite our imagination. Whether it’s a dangerous Thriller that gets your heart racing, or a quirky debut with a distinct voice you just can’t put down; a great book can whisk you away somewhere new and stay with you for a lifetime. In The Ratline, we delve deeper into the story of the escape of a committed Nazi, a party member since 1923 who rose through the ranks as Hitler consolidated his power to be appointed governor of Kraków in 1939 and then of Galicia in 1942, directly accountable to Heinrich Himmler until the fall of the Nazi regime. In 1945, wanted by the allies, Von Wächter evades capture, surviving as a fugitive for three years in the Austrian Alps before coming under the protection of a Vatican bishop, Alois Hudal.