On Bended Knees
The Second World War is over, but young Tomas learns that Europe’s wounds have not yet healed.
'You come to see [Tomas] is conserving himself deliberately against the old suffering, the tired old guilt of the adults… Simplicity is a great virtue, in novels as elsewhere. After all, it can only be produced from sincerity.' - Penelope Fitzgerald
It’s 1966. Young Tomas is taught by English war veterans, the adults around him haunted by memories of war. He walks the ruins of Coventry with his Gran, the city still rebuilding from the blitz. But his mother is German, and Tomas is torn between two worldviews.
As he nears adulthood Tomas heads to 1970s Berlin. He’s taken in by his enigmatic uncle, a blind, disgraced Nazi soldier. Arm in arm, they explore a drastically changing Berlin. Out in Dresden, a city decimated by Allied firebombs, Tomas finds more family with their hidden stories. This soaring, poignant novel invites readers to explore what we inherit from the wars of our elders, and how we might move on.
With this debut novel On Bended Knees, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, Martin Goodman started to explore a major theme of his writing: the aftermath of wars. Born in Leicester, the adults of his English childhood all carried their wartime stories, and as a teenager in the '70s he moved to West Berlin to look back on that wartime era through German eyes. His nonfiction picked up the theme and his biography of the scientist J.S. Haldane, who worked to counter WW1 gas attacks, Suffer & Survive, won 1st Prize, Basis of Medicine in the BMA Book Awards. In Client Earth, which won the Jury's Choice Business Book of the Year Award 2018, and the Green Book Award from Santa Monica Libraries, he told the story of ecolawyers who battle to rescue the planet from human destruction. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He lives in Los Angeles and London.
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