A unique premise, and a little risky to pull-off. But I thought it worked overall. I'll probably remember this one for a long time.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

The narrator of this book is another book—one saved from the Nazi fires. It recalls Heinrich Heine’s prescient observation: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” This first edition is Joseph Roth’s “Rebellion (1924).” That novel depicts a WWI amputee who, as compensation for his service, is given a medal and permission to work in the streets as an organ grinder. This leads to intense disillusionment and rebellion. Hamilton takes advantage of the timeless nature of literature to focus on nationalistic fervor then and now. “The past is no longer safe.” the book observes, “My time is coming back.” Indeed, today’s political expediencies seem to reflect what the book calls the Nazi’s “appetite for dishonesty…” blurring “the boundaries between fact and fiction.”

The plot involves an intriguing mystery surrounding the book. It originally belonged to Professor David Gluckstein who taught German literature in Berlin in 1933. He entrusted it to one of his students, Dieter Knecht, for safekeeping during the Nazi book burning frenzy. You see, Roth and Gluckstein were suspect to the book burners because both were Jews. Knecht bequeathed the book to his son, who later passed it on to his granddaughter, Lena, an artist living today in NYC. She discovers an enigmatic hand drawn map on one of the book’s end papers and takes it along with her on a business trip to Berlin with the vague aim of discovering the map’s location and thus (maybe?) revealing its meaning. Along the way, a purse snatcher steals and abandons the book in a dumpster. A Chechen refugee, named Armin Schneider, discovers it there and returns it to Lena.

Hamilton has a great story here, but he risks losing focus by including too many subplots. Clearly, this material is not extraneous because it highlights most of Hamilton’s agendas: the potential for inhumanity in state politics; the dangers of extreme nationalism; how hatreds can fester throughout history; the interconnectedness of events through time; and ideas about homeland. He follows Joseph Roth’s true-life marriage to Frieda through her mental breakdown and murder by the Nazis. He also documents Roth’s own descent into despair and early death at 44 from alcoholism. Lena has an affair with Armin, a man whose family was killed in a Chechnyan bombing which left him with shrapnel wounds and his sister, Madina, an amputee. The latter, along with her role as a musician, is a not-so subtle reminder of Roth’s protagonist in “Rebellion.” Bogdanov is a hate filled right-wing extremist who is obsessed with Madina and terrorizes her brother in retribution for her spurning him. Mike, Lena’s significant other, works as a security consultant in the U.S. and relates his mother’s land dispute to Lena from a distance. Clearly, this is meant to represent the historical European conflicts that gave rise to the wars and their aftermath.

The multiple interlocking narratives distract from Hamilton’s main story and risk confusion. Although revealing, the subplots and characters seem more allegorical than real. They render a mythic quality to the narrative. Clearly, the ending is intended to be thrilling, yet it seems hurried and contrived. Notwithstanding such shortcomings, Hamilton succeeds in presenting Berlin as a community haunted by its past but embracing multiculturalism and freedom.

I liked the idea of this book – the pages of a book telling us the story – but that’s about all I liked about it. I can’t really summarize the plot because I feel like it hopped around all over the place and unfortunately, I was not captivated to read it, in fact, I was bored. I had to put it down and pick it up later to finish.

I must admit I hadn’t heard of Joseph Roth nor his masterpiece “Rebellion” so that was something new to me. Roth is one of the characters and we learn a bit about his life and his wife’s struggle with mental health just at the outbreak of WWII.

Then there’s the mystery of the map drawn into the book and one of the characters wants to find the location.

I’m afraid that I just wasn’t the reader for this book, I’ve read some strong reviews, so it might work for you.

The premise of this book sounded so incredible to me. I have never read a book that was written from the perspective of a book, which seemed like such a good idea. Unfortunately, this just fell flat for me. Though I liked the perspective the story gave on how it felt to be a book and how they saw the outside world and communicated, other aspects of the story felt way too detailed and it was hard not to get bogged down in that for me. Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the ARC.

"It's hard to believe things that make no effort to be true." And in sounding excessively false at times, this novel ends up a disappointment, frustrating in how easy it is to picture a superior version.

To start with, this might be more distinctive than expected, depending on where you live – getting a download of an American copy I found it centre-aligned, unusually, although other editions from elsewhere might not be. It is distinctive to start with, however, and not just in layout, as it is narrated by a book. A copy of a Joseph Roth novel, it's been adorned with professorial marginalia and a diagram that might just well be a treasure map if it can ever be read successfully, and it was smuggled away from the Nazi book burning staged in Berlin. Now it's back in the city, in the hands of a prior owner's artist granddaughter, who's been charged with looking after it as an heirloom, and who is intrigued by the map. Throughout it will tell us about her and her story, it and its story, and the life and times and works of Herr Roth, a Jewish author hounded out of Germany between the wars.

What is most distinctive, however, is that it is much more engaging and more lifelike when it is the book talking to us, and not it reporting on human dialogue. Chunks of this are where Lena the artist talks about her evening out to her hostess in Berlin, and while the German woman speaks English perfectly, Lena here dictates the night in a style no human has ever used. And veracity and reality are supposed to be key here – the book is supposed to know how to tell its story (the one printed in its pages) to all readers, and should also manage its story (the one it's enacting, with Lena et al in Berlin), so why is it a struggle for it?

What's more, such struggles really impact on the purpose of the whole conceit. It has before then dropped hints that it wants to foretell of future struggle, as if book burning, lies in the press believed to be the truth, and the kinds of bigotry and abuse and more that Roth was witness to, are coming back. And so Berlin becomes an unappealing city of petty crime (although to be fair, Stroud comes out of things just as badly), and the homeless and immigrant become key as they would have been on the pages of Roth in the 1920s. This might well be the theme of the book, that we're dissolving into our own Weimar kind of mindset of hedonism (someone complains about too many happy superlatives being banded about) and hatred.

But that theme just doesn't make for an interesting read. It clouds the fun to be had with the book informing us about Roth – and the bleakness in informing us about his wife. It gets in the way of the book's telling us about its owners, and the love triangle of more recent events. That's what I should have taken from these pages, not just spurious mentions of random thievery, racism and discrimination. While the Roth narrative and the main story concerning Lena should have been brightly memorable, the patchy eggwash gained from discussing 2020s society makes this a disappointment, and doesn't allow it to hang together – just as Lena's unearthly reportage failed to do. Two and a half stars.

I reviewed this book for BookBrowse. As well as being a real page-turner, 'The Pages' is informative and thought-provoking. Any lover of books would appreciate the narrative voice, which is that of a book that escaped the book-burning ceremony in Berlin on 10 May 1933. The best book I've read in a long time.

A great page turner in the covid era... a great escape for an afternoon, a day at the beach, a vacation or plane read to divert ones thoughts from everyday life.

This book has a book in it that is doing a book is supposed to do: telling a story. Not by the words arranged in a certain string between its covers, but also by narrating a story of how those words put together and how it moved from one reader to another. True tale has been told by the book that was saved from a Nazi bonfire, hidden between other acceptable books only to be defaced by a Neo-nazi.

Lena was tasked to solve the mystery of the map drawn on a page of aforementioned book. The book belonged to her grandfather and his professor before him. It was a gem that was saved from dark pits of Germany before WWII. Lena didn’t know German nor she visited Germany. But she finally decided to pay a visit to her uncle to figure out what the map hides. The moment she arrived in Germany, her bag (with the book in it) was stolen. A Chechen immigrant happened to find the book and returned to her.

The story actually started after the reunion. This man and his sister somehow inserted themselves, not on purpose though, into Lena’s quest for the answers and became her muse for her next artwork. But what happened in between was more than tragic…

The Pages by Hugo Hamilton ultimately was not for me. I thought the premise sounded wonderful, but it feel into the trap of rehashing the same tired effects of WWII books.

The Pages is a delightful and immersive book following the incredible journey of Die Rebellion, a first edition novel nearly burned by the Nazis in May 1933. Through multiple historical events that have immensely shaped the European culture, Hugo Hamilton looks at past and present nation, culture, race and ideology matters.

Hamilton gives voice to the novel, making him a poignant and extraordinary narrator. As a book lover, it was refreshing to imagine books as living entities, each with their own voices, stories, secrets and thoughts. Having a novel narrating his very own account spanning over a century gave a more intimate reading experience which I loved.

Though vastly detailed and researched, the many characters and individual timelines were sometimes confusing, unconnected and blurring the main storyline. I felt some stories could have been left aside to give a stronger narrative to the main cast. Regardless, The Pages beautifully combines the love of literature, art, history and memory in one unique and compelling story.

This just didn't hold my attention -- I didn't finish it.






adding fluff to meet the minimum word count . . .

The protagonist of this book is the book itself, Rebellion, which tells its tale of terror and atrocity from the days of the Third Reich in Berlin, 1933, when the book was nearly destroyed by the Nazis. The book travels through time and space, telling of those it meets on its journey, and the stories are filled with fear, grief and hope. This is a story worthy of a large audience, but readers should note that the intersecting story and timelines, along with a large cast of characters will take some concentration to appreciate. And appreciate they will, this is a uniquely told story, obviously meticulously researched

This was a very unique story told from the perspective of a book saved from the book burnings in Nazi Germany. Spanning over a century, our narrator guides us from the past to the present and warns us of the dangers of repeating history.

I can’t help but compare this to The Book Thief due to the unconventional narrator and the subject matter of book preservation. The author clearly spent a lot of time doing research, and he writes in a way that makes the reader feel like they are there.

Overall, this is a solid book with a clear message. However, the multiple timelines ended up crowding the overall story for me. I still have a lot of respect for what Hamilton was able to accomplish.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for this advanced copy.