{"product_id":"9780374614249","title":"Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs","description":"Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down - and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweller, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist. Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there's Gretel's own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world - soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars - was one from which Gretel's father wished to shelter her?\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44581484036274,"sku":"9780374614249","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780374614249.jpg?v=1720882841","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780374614249","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}