The Game of Opposites — Norman Lebrecht

From the author of The Song of Names (winner of the 2002 Whitbread First Novel Award), a powerful new novel that explores the reverberations of love and hate in the story of one man's unlikely survival.

In an unnamed country at the end of a world war, Paul Miller escapes from a labor camp, collapsing after running only a few hundred feet. He is taken in by a young woman named Alice, and by the time she has nursed him back to health, the war has ended. With no one to return to and learning to love the woman who saved him, Paul decides to stay where he is. Over time he marries Alice, has a family, helps to rebuild the village, and, eventually, becomes its mayor.

But Paul is inescapably haunted by his life before the war, by his time in the camp, and by the fact that the people who are now his friends ignored for years the labor camp in their midst. When the camp's commander returns to the village, Paul is at last faced with the moral dilemma that will force him to choose between vengeance and forgiveness.

The Game of Opposites tells a universal tale of good and evil with extraordinary humanity and poignancy. It is a stunning evocation of the capability for both within all of us.