The Drinker [Paperback]

Written in an encrypted notebook while incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum and discovered after his death,The Drinkermay be Hans Fallada’s most breathtaking piece of craftsmanship. It is an intense yet absorbing study of the descent into drunkenness by an intelligent man who fears he’s lost it all.

***

This is a Hybrid Book.

Melville House HybridBooks combine print and digital media into an enhanced reading experience by including with each title additional curated material called Illuminations — maps, photographs, illustrations, and further writing about the author and the book. The Melville House Illuminations are free with the purchase of any title in the HybridBook series, no matter the format.“ 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

"In a publishing hat trick, Melville House allows English-language readers to sample Fallada's vertiginous variety accompanying the release of Michael Hoffman's splendid translation ofEvery Man Dies Alonewith the simultaneous publication of excellent English versions of Fallada's two best-known novels,Little Man, What Now?(translated by Susan Bennett) andThe Drinker(translated by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd).The Drinker, which Fallada wrote in 1944 while he was locked up in a criminal asylum for attacking his estranged wife, is a memoirish novel in which a country merchant describes his unrepentant, gloating slide into alcoholism and failure."
-- New York Times Book ReviewBefore WWII , German writer Hans Fallada’s novels were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countryml“ä