For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco
- & dreaming of the day of his release. Then he gets out. As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a job & even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation & deceit, & with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making... Hans Fallada`s dark & moving 1934 novel brilliantly describes a seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives & violent deeds, showing how our actions always catch up with us. Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? & The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.