Peter Faber is a German soldier on the Russian front during the Second World War. He marries a stranger, Katharina Spinell. They have chosen each other from photographs in a business arrangement - he will be granted 10 days leave for his honeymoon, she is guaranteed a war widow's pension if he dies. When they do eventually meet, they are surprised to find a mutual affection developing between them. The novel then traces his experiences back at the front, and hers in Berlin as her family struggle to gain influence and privilege within the Nazi party as the German war effort unravels. This is a brilliant, if grim, novel about ordinary people trapped by circumstance, about national delusion, and about the dehumanising effect of war. It evokes books like Bernard Schlink's The Reader and Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room. It's very good.