Bryan Malessa

A powerful novel set at the end of World War II about one woman and her family's struggle for survival.

A coming-of-age story about a young boy’s painful relationship with his family and its past, ‘The War Room’ is the second novel from Bryan Malessa, author of ‘The Flight’. Set in an Ohio village and the American South, ‘The War Room’ centres on a young boy and his increasingly difficult relationship with his father, a German immigrant who grew up in the war. As the boy prods his father over the years to learn more about his deceased grandparents and his father's past, his father becomes both violent and supportive, punishing his son physically while slowly opening up and revealing his past. Through a series of revelations, the son learns not only about his father's family history but also about his taciturn mother's past, a German descendant whose family settled in America generations earlier. Among the broader but not widely known public details he learns is that Germans are the largest ethnic group in the United States. But unlike the Anglos or Irish for example, who freely celebrate their cultures and thus appear larger, Germans disappear almost entirely and dissociate themselves from their ancestral homeland, which through two World Wars stood as the United States' pre-eminent enemy. As the boy grows and struggles with the painful details of his family's past and his larger ethnic culture, he is faced with the choice of embracing it or rejecting it forever. In the process of trying to reach a conclusion during his teenage years, he is taken by his older brother deep into another world that he had never intended to enter and from which he must fight for his life to free himself, so that he can find his missing father to confront the brutality he inflicted on them.

A powerful novel set at the end of World War II about one woman and her family's struggle for survival. The thrust of this epic novel occurs in the spring of 1945, during an event known in Germany as Die Flucht, or The Flight, when some 12 million Eastern European ethnic-Germans fled their ancestral homes to escape the advancing Soviet Army. ‘The Flight’ tells the story of Ida, a mother who attempts to take her children from their village in East Prussia to the assumed safety of Berlin. Travelling by foot, boat and rail across enemy lines, she quickly discovers that their survival is dependent on her will to save them, and on overriding the silent tragedies they will face during the journey west. Ida's is a terrifying passage, soaked with a bleak sadness, but her quiet bravery and sorrowful resilience in the face of the depravity of war is captivating. Told with clarity and beauty, in a remarkably understated way, ‘The Flight’ is a captivating novel of authenticity and power, which opens up a chapter of World War II long overlooked.