Remote Sympathy (B Format)

Leaving their Munich apartment isn't as difficult as Frau Greta Hahn expected. Their new home in Buchenwald is even lovelier, with Europe's finest craftsmen right on their doorstep. Just beyond the surrounding forest lies a work camp where Frau Hahn's husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, takes up his new position as administrator. As the prison population rises, corruption spreads and the infrastructure strains under pressure.

When Frau Hahn forms an unlikely alliance with prisoner Dr Lenard Weber, her wilful ignorance about what's happening so close to home is challenged. Dr Weber once invented the Sympathetic Vitaliser, believing its resonances might cure cancer. Whether it works or not, it might yet save a life.

Remote Sympathy examines the intersection of ordinary domestic life with extraordinary moral circumstances. A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, this novel compels us to question our ability to look the other way in a world once more convinced that everything – facts, truth, morals – is relative.

'Few readers will close the covers of this book unshaken.' —Annie Proulx

'Are there new ways to tell stories of the Holocaust that are neither crass nor exploitative? In this moving and unusual novel, Catherine Chidgey shows that there are.' —The Sunday Times (UK)

'Remote Sympathy takes us bravely, compellingly, into the uncertain heart of human complicity.' —Academy of New Zealand Literature

Catherine Chidgey lives in Cambridge and lectures in creative writing at the University of Waikato. The internationally bestselling author of nine novels, she has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction twice. Following The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy, Catherine’s novel The Book of Guilt (2024) completes a trilogy of novels about twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Cover artwork: Nigel Wood, Oak Tree at Night (nigel-wood.co.uk)
Cover design: Todd Atticus