Acclaim
An enthralling novel.
You will suffer a couple of blows to the heart and the solar plexus by the time you finish All That I Am, a book that hits a nerve and jangles the body, for it speaks to the times we are living in RIGHT NOW. Courage, it seems, is a constant, is a precious element of humankind in times of upheaval and terror. The need for truth, yearning, and the connection of one human to the next — as Anna Funder writes it — is so tangible it popped my head apart some.
Imaginative, compassionate and convincing.
Funder writes with grace and conviction about the intrusion of the political on the domestic and the thrill of falling in love over a cause.
Anna Funder has written an essential novel about how we carry the bricks of history on our backs, and how we continually build new homes from the material of the past. All That I Am is an intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another. Funder breathes life into Kundera’s aperçu that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Absorbing…by alternating between Ernst and Ruth, Funder leaps through time with alacrity. She adds an integral perspective on a shopworn subject by invoking the lives of Nazi dissidents whose attempts to alert the world to the growing menace of Nazism were ignored until it was too late.
A literary work as suspenseful as the best thrillers, Funder’s extraordinary first novel is an unflinching portrait of courage in devastating circumstances.
In what she has to say about love and betrayal there is profound truth.
Spellbinding.
A superb novel… This book is a wonder. Do, please, read it…
A bravura piece of storytelling—perfectly plotted, exactingly described…Funder has taken the raw material of truth and from it created a novel of real power and beauty.
Superb…Funder writes beautifully, with an understated lyricism that never gets in the way of the gripping story. Deeply moving.
The subtlety of Anna Funder’s novel is in the elegance of her precise prose, and in her painstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in extraordinary events…The result is a strong and impressively humane novel.
A seamless and powerful tale…a narrative of individual endeavour and survival, which examines universal themes. Above all, this is a book with a strong moral compass…Dora and Ruth, especially, convey a sense of truthfulness and decency that transcends their time and should inspire us, even now, to expose injustice and tyranny.
Anna Funder proved herself a first-rate reporter with Stasiland—now she appears as a compelling novelist in a dark story of German emigrés in the 1930’s, struggling to warn the indifferent English against the Nazis.
A gripping story of love and betrayal. Dora is the most attractive fictional heroine in a long time.
With all the excitement of a thriller, an absorbing study of exile, courage and memory.
With its story of Europe’s huddled outcasts of the Third Reich, All that I am should be compared to such novels as Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph and Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento.
A beautiful ensemble novel of Graham Greene-esque proportions in terms of suspense and moral scope…Elegantly illuminates the bloom and emaciation of love under extreme pressure.
A murder mystery now more than three generations old becomes a catalyst for a deeper, richer story about two perennial but inexhaustible themes, love and loyalty. Rarely has a novel been filled with such intelligent, inquisitive, introspective characters.
A pacy and exciting read. Captures perfectly the sense of her characters’ deprived and dangerous lives.
Fascinating, chilling. Funder really does write beautifully. All That I Am is sure to capture many readers.
Funder’s political and moral intelligence shine even more brightly than in STASILAND; the compassionate but unsentimental truthfulness towards her characters even more moving for being interwoven into a narrative of such complexity.
A ripper.
Funder is a sophisticated, psychologically subtle writer…All That I Am is, unquestionably, about people and issues that matter. It is provocative, imaginative, sometimes fierce and always humane. I loved it.