The Inventory

Combining the authenticity of reportage with the emotional intensity of an extraordinary imagination, The Inventory is a profoundly unsettling account of the effects of Nazi paranoia upon every segment of German society. Writing with piercing clarity and searing irony, Gila Lustiger weaves together the tales of ordinary people swept up in a society where brutal oppression and extermination are everyday events.

Amid the routine of daily life—with its flirtations and quarrels, longings and disappointments—the mechanism of persecution spares no one: A renowned opera singer is savagely beaten for suspicion of homosexuality; a mother writes to the Ghetto Administration for a good deal on penknives confiscated from Jewish deportees; a student is tortured by the Gestapo for a vague association with the Young Socialist Workers; a husband files for divorce when his wife shops at a Jewish-owned store. Intersecting stories of common citizens, both sinned against and sinning, reveal uncanny, entwined relationships in a nation where no one remains untouched by suspicion and fear, where respectable housewives become informants and saviors, and children become protectors and abusers.

A masterly display of bravura virtuosity, The Inventory is the final, terrible account of how all—old and young, affluent and destitute, the pampered and neglected—were transformed by oppression and tyranny. Proclaimed a classic in Germany, this unforgettable novel establishes Gila Lustiger as one of contemporary literature’s most important voices.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Gila Lustiger was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1963 and educated at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since 1987 she has lived in Paris with her husband, the French poet Emmanuel Moses, and their two children.

“[O]ne of the most powerful testimonies we have to the gathering storm that annihilated a whole population.” —The New York Times

“A book of extraordinary suggestive power. Gila Lustiger lifts perpetrators and victims [of the Nazi era] out of the fog of anonymity into the light of substantiality.” —Berliner Zeitung (Germany)

“Like Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Gila Lustiger’s The Inventory offers a tapestry of German society. . . . Deeply moving.” —Le Monde