The Spring of Kasper Meier, Ben Fergusson
The Spring of Kasper Meier, Ben Fergusson
List: $22.99 | Sale: $16.09
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The Spring of Kasper Meier
‘Beguiling, unsettling, and wonderfully atmospheric’ (Sarah Waters)

Author: Ben Fergusson

Narrator: Leighton Pugh

Unabridged: 11 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/03/2014


Synopsis

The war is over, but Berlin is a desolate sea of rubble. There is a shortage of everything: food, clothing, tobacco. The local population is scrabbling to get by. Kasper Meier is one of these Germans, and his solution is to trade on the black market to feed himself and his elderly father. He can find anything that people need, for the right price. Even other people.

When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs. But Eva is prepared for this. Kasper has secrets, she knows them, and she'll use them to get what she wants. As the threats against him mount, Kasper is drawn into a world of intrigue he could never have anticipated. Why is Eva so insistent that he find the pilot? Who is the shadowy Frau Beckmann and what is her hold over Eva?

Under constant surveillance, Kasper navigates the dangerous streets and secrets of a city still reeling from the horrors of war and defeat. As a net of deceit, lies and betrayal falls around him, Kasper begins to understand that the seemingly random killings of members of the occupying forces are connected to his own situation. He must work out who is behind Eva's demands, and why - while at the same time trying to save himself, his father and Eva.

About Ben Fergusson

Ben Fergusson's debut novel, The Spring of Kasper Meier, was awarded the Betty Trask Prize and the HWA Debut Crown, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The Other Hoffmann Sister and An Honest Man complete a trilogy of novels set in the same apartment block in Berlin at key moments in the city's twentieth-century history. His short fiction has been published in journals internationally and in 2020 he won the Seán O'Faoláin International Short Story Prize. He also translates from German, winning a 2020 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. Ben lives in Berlin with his husband and son.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on September 14, 2014

I heard an interview with Ben Fergusson on Radio 2, and since it sounded like exactly the sort of book I'd enjoy, and Simon Mayo and the other people on his show were raving about the book, I thought I'd give it a try. In the end, it fell a bit flat for me. I enjoyed learning about post-war Berlin,......more

Goodreads review by Jamie on October 25, 2014

I’ve never read anything quite like this — powerful in the way in conjures the feel of a unique place and time, well-observed and very smoothly written. The atmospheric mood never overwhelms — partly due to the short and incisive chapters — and builds to a page-turning climax. I’m very curious to se......more

Goodreads review by Sid on February 07, 2016

The publisher kindly sent me a proof copy of this book to review, and I thought this was a good, well written novel with a remarkable evocation of post-war Berlin, but I did have my reservations. The story is set in the spring of 1946. Berlin is still shattered and occupied by Allied troops. People s......more


Quotes

Beguiling, unsettling, and wonderfully atmospheric. A dark expedition across a nightmarish landscape of physical and emotional damage and moral decay Sarah Waters

The finest thing in the novel is the imaginative recreation of time and place, the bombed and ruined city over which the past hangs darkly, where no possible future can yet be envisaged . . . A decidedly accomplished first novel . . . where the keenness of observation and the rhythms of the prose call Graham Greene to mind Scotsman

Similarly intelligent is Ben Fergusson's The Spring of Kasper Meier . . . the real coup here is the evocation of a minatory, crazy-quilt 1940s Berlin Independent

A truly outstanding work of fiction that will, I hope enter into the canon of English literature. It takes the known tragedies of the Second World War and extends them into what was, for most of the judges, an unknown arena: Berlin in the immediate aftermath of war, when the city was in ruins and the rubble gangs foraged for survival. The reality of it, the horror, was visceral and yet told with an immense and compassionate beauty. It's a masterpiece. To have written it as a first novel is an exceptional achievement Manda Scott

Fergusson has already won two awards for this gripping and atmospheric debut, a thriller set amid the rubble of a defeated Berlin in 1945...What follows is original and highly accomplished Sunday Times

The plot is tight, but it's the unflinching depiction of a desperate world in post-war Berlin, conveyed in beautiful prose, that makes this thriller so powerful Sunday Mirror

A superbly atmospheric novel with a thrilling suspenseful storyline running through it. Amid the rubble of post-war Berlin, characters scrabble to survive and to rebuild shattered lives. Damage is on view everywhere - devastated buildings, people damaged physically, psychologically and emotionally, legal and social structures in ruins . . . Ben Fergusson's grittily evocative novel, historically knowledgeable and piercing in its scrutiny of morally ambiguous characters, political murkiness and a world quivering with suspicion and jeopardy, impressively recalls Graham Greene's The Third Man

Fergusson's debut portrays the desperation of Berlin and its people at a time when a murder could go unnoticed. The plot grows more gripping as the reader navigates its surprising twists and turns Sunday Express

A formidable first novel - I loved it Sun

A powerful evocation of shattered lives trying to reconnect - and a heartbreaking story of the pain of compassion


Awards

  • The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award
  • Authors' Club Best First Novel Award
  • Betty Trask Award
  • HWA Debut Crown Award