In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium. The result is mesmerising: as a sharp-eyed journalist and a hugely imaginative historian, Mak makes IN EUROPE a dazzling account of that journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports and memoirs, and the voices of prominent figures and unknown players; from the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adriana Warno in Poland, with her holiday job at the gates of the camp at Birkenau. Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. In Europe is a masterpiece; it reads like the epic novel of the continent's most extraordinary century.