Amazing book. Easy five stars! I did not want to put it down! Will be recommending in my Facebook group! Also buying copies for my book loving family members!

Wow what emotive writing. Writing at its best. Heart-breaking, guilt, love, drama, love, forgiveness and humility rolled into orders from the German forces in WW2.

Truly a novel that was written with depth of feeling for the people it portrays.

Tip.. do not start this book without a pack of tissues at the ready, could not put this book down. Another burnt dinner!!!

Thank you Netgalley for letting me read this blockbuster

Four and a half stars rounded up to five. This book had three storylines that intersect. Max and Gerda are a young Jewish couple who own a toy shop. Josef was drafted into the SS when he was fifteen. And Freidrich is trying to unravel the secrets of his past.
I loved this book. I read it in one sitting. It was refreshing to read about a young German soldier who was conflicted about what he was doing, yet still followed orders. I couldn't wait to see what would happen next. Highly, highly recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

A historical novel that vividly highlights the suffering and torment of the Jews in the Second World War, but is intriguingly told also from the viewpoint of one of the German SS soldiers. So many of us assume we would never personally carry out such atrocities as did those men but through the emotional wrangles of one of his central characters Shapiro makes you realise decisions and actions were not necessarily so straightforward and willingly made by the aggressors.
´The Threads Remain` switches between the events as they occurred during the war and the life of the main character as he endeavours in 1957 to find the truth about his past. At first this moving between the years meant I took a bit of time to fully engage with the characters but, once I became familiar with them, I was hooked.
I think this will really appeal to steadfast fans of WW2 fiction but I also think it has the added twist of touching on the less common approach.
A definite must-read for me.

Glenn Shapiro's "The Threads Remain" is a precisely structured historical novel that excavates personal memory and national guilt with restraint and empathy. Avoiding melodrama or sentimentality, Shapiro crafts a narrative that is neither allegorical nor didactic but instead insists on the enduring weight of individual choices within the machinery of history.

Set primarily in wartime and post-war Germany, the novel unfolds in two interlacing timelines. In 1957 Munich, Friedrich Becker, a young man raised without knowledge of his origins, uncovers the startling truth of his Jewish heritage and the circumstances that led to his adoption. Initiated by the death of his adoptive mother, his search takes him through orphanage records, crumbling memories, and guarded testimonies. His quest for self-understanding is paralleled by a second narrative: the wartime experience of Josef Zohren, a blond, physically imposing German boy whose recruitment into the Einsatzgruppen places him at the heart of the Nazi regime's most brutal operations.

The novel's power lies in its restraint. Shapiro refrains from offering simple distinctions between good and evil. Characters are shaped by their environments but not absolved by them. Josef's arc is not a redemption tale but an ethical dissection. His internal conflicts are rendered with uncomfortable clarity, illustrating how complicity can coexist with humanity and how one moment of courage does not erase a ledger of violence.

Friedrich's pursuit of truth is handled with equal care. Unlike many novels set in this era that rely on the reader's assumed emotional response to the Holocaust, Shapiro focuses instead on how the legacy of trauma operates in silence, in what is hidden, forgotten, or deliberately unspoken. The post-war sections do not treat 1957 Germany as a blank slate but rather as a place weighed down by denial and moral inertia. Institutions like the Arolsen Archive serve as reminders that memory must often be reconstructed from what remains—scraps of paper, uncertain recollections, a misremembered name.

What distinguishes "The Threads Remain" is not only its historical authenticity but also the way history is inextricably intertwined with the characters' lives. The confiscation of a Jewish toy shop, the indoctrination of youth, and the bureaucratic obfuscation of post-war Germany are the crucible in which the characters are forged. Yet the novel resists spectacle. Violence is not aestheticized; it is procedural, numbing, and systemic.

Shapiro's prose is clean and deliberate. His use of German terms and historical references is precise, never ornamental. Even the title bears thematic weight: threads that connect people across time, guilt and rescue, identity and erasure.

"The Threads Remain" does not promise healing, nor does it offer resolution. Instead, it asks what it means to live honestly in the aftermath of horror and whether such honesty is ever truly possible.

This review is based on an advance reader copy provided by NetGalley and BeRead Ltd / Brandylion Press, 2025.