The Chosen Ones: A Novel

The Chosen Ones: A Novel by Sem-Sandberg, Steve. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780374122805.

The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germanys annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institutions benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regimes euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinics inhabitants. Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. An absorbing, emotionally overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the authors sharp sense of the absurd. Passionately serious, meticulously researched, and deeply profound, this extraordinary and dramatic novel bears witness to oppression and injustice, and offers invaluable and necessary insight into an intolerable chapter in Austria’s past.