Diary of the fall - Michel Laub

'I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out ... but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed'

A schoolboy prank goes horribly wrong, and a thirteen-year-old boy is left injured. Years later, one of the classmates relives the episode as he tries to come to terms with his demons.

Diary of the Fall is the story of three generations: a man examining the mistakes of his past, and his struggle for forgiveness; a father with Alzheimer's, for whom recording every memory has become an obsession; and a grandfather who survived Auschwitz, filling notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.

Beautiful and brave, Michel Laub's novel asks the most basic - and yet most complex - questions about history and identity, exploring what stories we choose to tell about ourselves and how we become the people we are.

Michel Laub's next book, A Poison Apple, will be published on 6th July 2017.

Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre and currently lives in Sao Paulo. He is a writer and journalist, and was named one of Granta's twenty 'Best of Young Brazilian Novelists'. Diary of the Fall, which received the Brasilia Award, was his first novel to appear in English. It won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize 2015 and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2016.

Extraordinary... In my world, this novel is already a classic
Karl Ove Knausgaard

A powerful exploration of memory and guilt
Guardian

A work of immense incantatory power
Literary Review - Neel Mukherjee

Astonishingly powerful ... Diary of a Fall may well emerge as one of the finest novels published in English this year
Irish Times - Eileen Battersby

A gripping, thoughtful novel... Laub beautifully retrieves the tragedy of the holocaust from its scholarship, politics and deniers, cutting to the bone of human life, its longings and limitations
Independent - Tabish Khair