All action heroine

HISTORIANS OFTEN warn against the temptation to slot the past into neat compartments but we seldom listen to them. It is only too easy to dice up time into manageable segments. The Second World War, German persecution of the Jews, the Holocaust itself, all appear to have set dates. But (John Murray, £17.99) a thriller written by Stephan Abarbanell,

a German born in Hamburg in 1957, begins in 1946 among the rubble and ruin of the Third Reich and in the bomb-blasted streets and squares of a shattered world.

The book, translated by Lucy Renner Jones, is about “a time between times”, as the author puts it, set in a world marked by traumas and fears and exploring themes of identity, rootlessness and the search for meaning.

Lilya, born to Jewish-German parents in Palestine, is the all-action heroine of this lucid and intriguing novel. Trained as soldier in the fight for a Jewish homeland, she is the ultimate outsider, sent on a mission to Germany to find the lost brother of a prominent writer long exiled to Jerusalem after the collapse of the brief period of liberation in the 1920s.

Professor Raphael Lind is assumed dead but Lilya is dogged in her search and brings a recklessness to her role as a guide through the lives of survivors and fugitives she encounters.

She is the perfect avatar in this shaky world, dispassionate but thoughtful and open to love. Helped by the troubled David Guggenheim, an American officer, she is fearless in her quest, even when confronted with the chance of a secret interview with a prominent Nazi commander.

“What are you going to ask him,” Guggenheim asks, “what was the Third Reich like and, by the way, what did you do with all the Jews? There’s one in particular I was rather fond of.” But Lilya goes anyway and ends up in one of many shoot-outs that puncture the story with cinematic excitement.

This is an exciting and compelling story about people in “ruptured times”. And while it is firmly set in the summer of 1941, it has resonance for the risk and courage of the displaced of our own troubled era.

ANNE GARVEY