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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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THE TOYMAKER

Liam Pieper

A person is defined by the secrets they keep...
Adam Kulakov likes his life. He's on the right side of middle age; the toy company he owns brightens the lives of children around the world; and he has more money than he can ever spend, a wife and child he adores, and as many mistresses as he can reasonably hide from them.
And he is not the only one with secrets. In 1944, Adam's grandfather, Arkady, was imprisoned in Auschwitz and given an impossible choice. Now, as he's coming to the end of his life, he has to keep the truth from his family, and hold back the crushing memories of his time with one of history's greatest monsters.

As a mistake threatens to bring Adam's world tumbling down around him, the past reaches for Arkady. Everything he's spent a lifetime building will be threatened, as will everything Adam and his family think they know of the world.
Bold, dark and compelling, The Toymaker is a novel about privilege, fear and the great harm we can do when we are afraid of losing what we hold dear.

Liam Pieper is a Melbourne-based author and journalist. His first book was a memoir, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, shortlisted for the National Biography Award and the Ned Kelly Best True Crime award. His second was the Penguin Special Mistakes Were Made, a volume of humorous essays. He was co-recipient of the 2014 M Literary Award, winner of the 2015 Geoff Dean Short Story Prize and the inaugural creative resident of the UNESCO City of Literature of Prague. The Toymaker is his first novel.
Available products
Book

Published 2016-06-27 by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin Australia

Book

Published 2016-06-27 by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin Australia

Comments

Italy (De Agostini Libri Spa), Russia (Family Leisure Book Club), Audio (Bolinda)

His writing is electric.

From the first few pages ofThe Toymakerit’s obvious that Liam Pieper isn’t pulling any punches: he has your attention straight away as his privileged, wealthy protagonist Adam makes the first in a series of blunderingly bad decisions. Adam, a charming but self-centered man, has inherited his grandfather’s toy company and leads a lavish lifestyle that indulges his childlike and impetuous nature. It’s a lifestyle that’s starkly at odds with that of his grandfather Arkady, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz for homosexuality and put to work in a Sonderkommando. Selected to assist with the medical experiments of Josef Mengele, Arkady is tricked into thinking he can help save some of the children who are used as specimens. Instead, the best he can do is carve them crude toys, a pastime that becomes his post-war salvation. Pieper, whose 2014 memoirThe Feel-Good Hit of the Yearwas shortlisted for the National Biography Award and a Ned Kelly Award, writes superbly.The Toymakergives immediate and absorbing pleasure, and has similarities to J M Coetzee’sDisgracein terms of the main character’s wretched search for redemption, both for himself and for humanity. It ends abruptly, posing a question of judgement, but its real interest lies in how flawed human beings can try to get better.

Pieper is a sharp, smart and classy writer.

Hugely memorable, The Toymaker is an unflinching examination of the dark instinct for survival that lies in all of us.