Kafka's Lost Book

In April 1933, the police carried twenty manuscript notebooks out of a Berlin flat. That part is history. They were never seen again.October 1989. The German Democratic Republic is out of money and selling what it has. Alistair Wren, a British manuscript expert, crosses the Wall at the invitation of intermediaries who sign nothing, to examine an object nobody will discuss out loud.He has five days, a lens and a borrowed room.What he finds is a black oilcloth notebook, written from end to end, without a title and without a name - and a seizure record from fifty-six years ago in which a single word has been scraped away with a penknife and another typed over it.Half a millimetre out of line.Outside, an entire country is beginning to come apart in the streets.Wren is very good at reading paper and very bad at reading people. It will take him weeks to understand that everyone around him wants something different from the same object - and that the only person in the world with the right to decide its fate has no idea it exists.Kafka's Lost Book is a literary thriller about documents, memory and the price of obedience. A suspense novel with no gunfire, in which the weapon is a rubber stamp and the only reliable witness is the paper.For readers of Robert Harris, John le Carré and Kate Atkinson - and of historical fiction in which the past refuses to be filed away quietly.Includes an afterword setting out exactly what is documented history and what is invention.