Oskar Voxlauer is in flight from his past - from his bourgeois Austrian upbringing; from horrific memories of fighting on the Italian Front in 1917; and from the twenty years he has spent in the Ukraine watching his Bolshevik ideals crumble and the physical decline of the woman who taught him about love.

In 1938, he finally returns to the small Austrian town of his birth where his mother is waiting to greet a son she hasn't seen since he was a boy.

But, despite Oskar's attempts to live a reclusive existence as a gamekeeper up in the hills, he cannot escape the tensions that are threatening the tranquil town of Niessen. When Hitler marches into Austria and the Blackshirts come to the valley.

John Wray was born in Washington, DC in 1971, the son of an Austrian mother and an American father, both scientists. His childhood was divided between the United States and Austria and this novel draws on his Austrian family history. In 1996 a selection of his poems won a prize from the Academy of American Poets and New York University. He is the author of three novels,The Right Hand of Sleep, LowboyandCanaan's Tongue.He lives in New York.

'Like Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, The Right Hand of Sleep lays out the past century's dilemma in terms of politics versus the personal... Readable and moving' - Observer>