From the publisher:
A lean, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna.
Vienna, 1919. A mighty empire has come crashing down—and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an architect whose radically modern creation has ignited a scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a ballet master who develops a strange new position for the feet. More stories follow in alphabetical order—about an immunologist and a jeweler, a revolutionary and a satirist, a waif and an X-ray technician and a Zionist—characters crossing paths in a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed city. There are artists who ape the innocence of children and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent. And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater . . . Is it any wonder that this world—soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars—is one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?
"Intricate, unexpected, and delightful . . . An ingeniously woven novel . . . Playful, charming, and brilliant—a profundity made of toylike whimsies." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This spirited volume lingers long after the final page.”—Publishers Weekly
"Adam Ehrlich Sachs makes books that make their own traditions. This is the highest praise I know, for serious." —Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus
"Relentless, in the best way possible. Think Mary Poppins’s satchel, think one deranged matrioshka constantly coming out from under another—Gretel and the Great War is the gift that keeps on giving. Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." —Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd
"Countless writers take pleasure in the style of their own sentences. Few of them provide such pleasure to their readers. Sachs provides it again and again. He doesn't let up. Plus he’s funny as hell. No writer alive is more startlingly alive." —Adam Levin, author of Mount Chicago
"His lunatics clamor to be believed, but Sachs wants something else: pin-thin-fancies that braid a rope to make your legs dance." —Jesse Ball, author of The Divers’ Game