Chosen Ones

An absorbing emotionally overwhelming novel rich in incident and character The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by Sem-Sandberg’s sharp sense of the absurd.The Am Spiegelgrund Clinic in glittering Vienna masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality however was very different: in the wake of Germany’s annexation of Austria during WWII the clinic’s doctors nurses and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution’s benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime’s euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic’s inhabitants.Through the eyes of a child inmate Adrian Ziegler and a nurse Anna Katschenka award-winning novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg explores the very meaning of survival in this profoundly moving and dramatic novel that bears witness to oppression and injustice during an intolerable period of Austria’s past.