The Zookeeper's War

An extraordinary, award-winning debut, a story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war.

Winner of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Christina Stead Award for Fiction.

In wartime Berlin, who can you trust?

1943: Each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo, an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo's director. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages. When the zoo's staff is drafted into the army, forced labourers are sent in as replacements. At first, Vera finds the idea abhorrent, but gradually she realises that the new workers are the zoo's only hope, and forms an unlikely bond with one of them.

But Berlin is a city where a foreign accent is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours' dinner guests to the Gestapo. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing and no one, it seems, can be trusted.

The Zookeeper's War is a powerful novel of a marriage and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism — and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.

'Beautifully textured and extremely well realised ... a clever, inspired, insightful, tension-filled drama' Bookseller + Publisher