Library for the War-Wounded

The second volume in Monika Helfer's internationally bestselling wartime trilogy, based on the history of her own family.

We called him Vati, Dad. Not Father, not Papa. That's what he wanted. He thought it sounded modern. He wanted to present himself to us, and through us, as a man in tune with the modern age. Though he seemed to come from nowhere.

Monika Helfer's award-winning novel Last House Before the Mountain captured her maternal grandmother's struggle through the ravages of World War One. The second novel in her family trilogy turns to her paternal line, circling the life of her father, Josef.

He was an illegitimate child, a charity case from Salzburg, schooled by a benefactor. He was drafted in high school, sent to Russia, and returned with one leg. He married his nurse, and brought his family to the high, idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps, where he took a position as manager of a home for injured WWI soldiers, a strangely suspended, deeply isolated place with a remarkable library.

Josef was a man of many mysteries. To his daughter, Monika, none was greater than his obsession with these cloistered, crumbling books, his great treasure and secret amidst a country barreling away from the memory of war.

Beautifully written, restrained, and memorable, Library for the War-Wounded turns lived experience into great literature by confronting the universal question: Who are our parents, really?