The Drinker

By Hans Fallada
Translated by Charlotte Lloyd and A.L. Lloyd

“Brilliant and devastating…It haunted my dreams.”—The Chicago Reader

“This is an heroic book, brave, fearless and honest. It is necessary reading.”—The Sunday Times, London

“Genuinely tragic and beautiful…[Fallada’s] perfectly horrifying, horrifyingly perfect novel is the story of himself rejected by society and returning the insult.”—New Statesmen

This astonishing, autobiographical tour de force was written by Hans Fallada in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. Discovered after his death, it tells the tale-often fierce, often poignant, often even extremely funny-of a small business-man losing control as fights valiantly to blot out an increasingly oppressive society.

In a brilliant translation by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd, it is presented here with an afterword by John Willett that details the life and career of the once internationally acclaimed Fallada, and his fate under the Nazis-which brings out the horror of the events behind the book.

Paperback
304 pages 
Melville House, 2009
Originally published in 1950
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches 
ISBN 9781933633657
Biographical Fiction, Historical Fiction