The Train Was on Time

His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection * Daily Telegraph * Bll combines a mammoth intelligence with a literary outlook that is masterful and unique -- Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 My most-admired contemporary novelist -- John Ashbery We must be grateful to the Penguin European Writers series, a precious venture in these dark times -- John Banville From the moment I stepped on board the troop train with Private Andreas, concerns pertaining to my own world fell away completely. Holding this impelling book is tantamount to holding the young soldier's fate in one's hands. It is impossible to let go. -- Claire-Louise Bennett, author of 'Pond' Bll's novel blows a stent in the human heart, and shows us the terror there. It feels more necessary than ever -- Anna Funder, from the introduction This is the best book I have read this year; not by miles, but by whole astronomical units; I am stunned by it as if by a blow. It is *astonishing* to the extent that I cannot convey to you its power - how gradually one lies clutching the book wrenched into pieces by the imagery and by the extravagant profundity with which the soldier's fear and desire and unhappiness is felt... -- Sarah Perry, bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth

Heinrich Bll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. Born in Cologne in 1917, Bll was raised in a pacifist Catholic family who later opposed Nazism. After an apprenticeship at a bookseller's, he was drafted into the Nazi Wehrmacht before being sent to an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. After the war he enrolled at university, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier: The Train Was on Time was his first novel and he went on to become one of the most important postwar German authors. Bll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in 1985.