The breaking of eggs - Jim Powell

'You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs'

The apologists of Josef Stalin

Feliks Zhukovski, a Pole in Paris, is a hangover from another age - a man who chose politics over people and ideas over love. His life's work is a travel guide to the old Eastern bloc; his personal life a series of failures.

Unfortunately for Feliks, it's 1991. Communism has collapsed, East Germany isn't the economic miracle he wants it to be, and at 61, his travel-writing days are numbered. Feliks makes the shock decision to sell his guide to an American firm, and sets in motion a life-changing chain of events. He will meet a brother he hasn't seen in fifty years, learn the horrifying truth about the mother he thought abandoned him, and get a second chance with a long-lost love. But after fifty years of misunderstandings and delusions, can he start his life afresh?

From the boulevards of Paris to the ghettos of wartime Poland, via Midwest America and the Berlin Wall, THE BREAKING OF EGGS chronicles the extraordinary journey of a lonely man who discovers it needn't have been so. As thought-provoking as it is moving, the novel casts an unflinching gaze on the human cost of a century of wars, in a voice that never loses its humour or uplifting power.