Oskar Voxlauer is in flight from his past. But despite his attempts to live a reclusive existence as a gamekeeper up in the hills, he cannot escape the tensions that are threatening the tranquil town of Niessen when Hitler marches into Austria and the Blackshirts come into the valley.

This extraordinary debut novel from Whiting Writers' Award winner John Wray is a poetic portrait of a life redeemed at one of the darkest moments in world history.
Twenty years after deserting the army in the first world war, Oskar Voxlauer returns to the village of his youth. Haunted by his past, he finds an uneasy peace in the mountains-but it is 1938 and Oskar cannot escape from the rising tide of Nazi influence in town. He attempts to retreat to the woods, only to be drawn back by his own conscience and the chilling realization that the woman whose love might finally save him is bound...

This year's Big American Novel is a high-concept epic that races through one family's experience of the twentieth century