Parallel Stories

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories : Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linke