Goodbye to Berlin

First published in 1939, this book is a set of linked sketches of Berlin in the early 1930s, narrated by a young Englishman who presents himself as a camera. He lodges in boarding houses, teaches English, and watches the city as the Nazis rise. Figures include the nightclub singer Sally Bowles, the landlady Fraulein Schroeder, a Jewish family under pressure, and young men drifting between bars and politics. The pieces are episodic: rooms, cabarets, weekends by the lakes, and the narrowing of ordinary life. It is reportage shaped as fiction, a portrait of a city and the people who have not yet left it.

Quarter-bound in blue cloth, paper sides printed with a colour painting by George Grosz. Blue slipcase. Maroon endpapers.