From the bestselling author of A Whole Life, a moving account of an ordinary young man living through extraordinary times, and the lengths we will go to in order to protect what we love.

'Tender and elegiac . . . Devastating . . . Complex, ambitious and moving' Times Literary Supplement

'Essential reading for the early years of the twenty-first century' Scotland on Sunday

'Told with a dry wit that enhances, rather than disguises, the sadness of its story, The Tobacconist is a touching miniature of an ordinary life irrevocably altered by the larger forces of history' Sunday Times

I enjoyed Robert Seethaler's The Tobacconist. The novel sets up a tiny tobacconist's shop in 1930s Vienna as a window on to a street, a city and a continent, all drifting into conflict.