Christine Leunens’s international bestseller Caging Skies is the inspiration for Jojo Rabbit, winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay by director Taika Waititi and nominee for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
An extraordinary, strikingly original novel that reveals a world of truth and lies both personal and political, Caging Skies is told through the eyes of Johannes Betzler, avid member of the Hitler Youth during World War II. Filled with admiration for the Führer and Nazi ideals, he is shocked to discover his parents are hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa behind a false wall in their home in Vienna.
After he’s disfigured in a raid, Johannes focuses more and more on his connection with the girl behind the wall. His initial horror and revulsion turn to interest—and then obsession. After his parents disappear, Johannes is the only one aware of Elsa’s existence in the house, and he alone is responsible for her fate. Drawing strength from his daydreams about Hitler, Johannes plans for the end of the war and what it might mean for him and Elsa.
Caging Skies is a work of rare power; a stylistic and storytelling triumph. Startling, blackly comic, and written in Christine Leunens’s gorgeous, muscular prose, this novel, her US debut, is singular and unforgettable.
“A vivid and deeply compelling novel, Caging Skies is an existential battle of moral and ethical extremes. Christine Leunens is an adept and eloquent storyteller.” —New York Times bestselling author Georgia Hunter
Praise
“Leunens is a strong writer, her prose supple and darkly engaging. Her depiction of wartime Vienna is nearly cinematic and utterly convincing. . . . A dark, disturbing novel . . . Vivid prose.”Kirkus Reviews
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New York Times Bestselling author We Were the Lucky Ones, Georgia Hunter“A vivid and deeply compelling novel, Caging Skiesis an existential battle of moral and ethical extremes. Christine Leunens is an adept and eloquent storyteller.”
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Le Monde“A beautiful novel, powerful, different, and ambitious. It explores . . . a love so total that it locks up, isolates, and colonizes the partner. An unforgettable book.”
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Historical Novel Society"A bold novel of great fierceness, insight, and emotional savagery. I admire Leunens's refusal to soft-soap anything, even as, while reading, I had to put the book down and pace around the room. But if you stick with Caging Skies, you'll get an entire era distilled into two people, a Tolstoyan marvel."
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Le Nouvel Observateur“One wonders why this beautiful, strange, and terrible subject had never been taken up before . . . the book fascinates and leaves a rare impression of strangeness and power.”
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