My Own Dear Brother

This powerful coming-of-age story tells of 13-year-old Ursula, who lives with her family in the small Austrian town of Felddorf in 1944. After her father's death on the Russian front, the family is thrown into turmoil, and Anton, the older brother Ursula idolizes, begins to display a cruelty that she can't understand. There are multiple hardships the family must endure; Russian prisoners escape from the local concentration camp and are brutally hunted down; Ursula's mother begins an affair with a married man; and Ursula's close friend, who is considered by some in the town to be "mentally deficient," is sent to a Nazi-run mental institution. Ursula then goes on a brave quest to rescue her friend from certain death. Müller's writing is lyrical and haunting, and she allows readers to delve deeply into the universal themes of loyalty, morality, and courage in the face of extreme adversity.