Description
To be truly alive means having to make choices. To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love.
Northern Germany, 1945.
Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers – forced labourers – fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall.
The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands.
Peace brings more soldiers – but English this time – and Red Cross staff officers.
Ruth, on her first posting from London, is given charge of a refugee camp on the heathland, crowded with former forced labourers.
As ever more keep arriving, she hears whispers, rumours of dark secrets about that snowy night.
The townspeople close ranks, shutting their mouths and minds to the winter’s events, but the town children are curious about the refugees on their doorstep, and Benno can’t carry his secret alone.
‘Marvellous…Seiffert juggles a very large cast with immense skill in a wide-ranging novel that beautifully balances the tumultuous reach of history with the everyday concerns of ordinary people’ – Daily Mail
‘I read Once the Deed Is Done with great pleasure…Great characters taking us deep into the physical challenges and moral quandaries of the time’ – Tim Pears
‘Such a beautiful and powerful book, emotional yet unsentimental…unforgettably reminds us of the cost of war’ – Lucy Jago
‘This fine novel investigates the fate of displaced people in the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war’ – Guardian
‘A complex, intelligent, deeply compassionate novel about the unglamorous aftermath of war…A brilliant piece of story-telling – stubbornly hopeful’ – Andrew Miller
‘Prose that is so lucid, so understated…this entire novel reverberates in ways that only haunt the reader more and more deeply, long after its last page’ – Paul Harding, Booker prize author of This Other Eden
‘I love that her novels take me to unexplored places and times…she has brought to life a complex interaction between survivors on both sides with humanity and compassion’ – Linda Grant
