Joan's picks: All the Broken Places and Undoctored

All the Broken Places by John Boyne. This is a sequel to the hugely popular The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas from several years ago, which was about how a family moved to live in a house beside Auschwitz when the husband/father was made Kommandant of the camp, and how his son Bruno struck up a friendship with a boy through the barbed wire. It was ostensibly written for YA but this sequel is very much for older readers. It tells the story of Bruno’s sister and mother who, after the Nuremberg trials when the Kommandant was executed for his war crimes, try to make a new life for themselves and erase the past. At the start of the book Gretel, the sister, is now in her 90’s living in a luxury apartment in London where no one knows about her past but something happens which threatens to unravel everything, and risks her exposure which would be a global scandal.  It is very very good – I loved it. 

Undoctored  by Adam Kay. Another sequel – this time to This is Going to Hurt which we talked about a while ago when it turned up on one of the screening platforms. Nonfiction, of course – the author gave up medicine after a particularly traumatic event and tried to build a career in comedy. The book is very very funny, incredibly up front and honest and anyone who loved the first book, or the TV series, will love it. 

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