"The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis."-Primo Levi

This never-before-translated masterpiece-by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn't join the Nazi Party-is based on a true story.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, it's more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order-it's a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what's right, and each other.

Hans Fallada was one of Germany's best-selling authors-ranking with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse-prior to the rise of the Nazis. But while those writers fled Germany, Fallada stayed. Refusing to join the Nazi Party, he suffered numerous difficulties, including incarceration in an insane asylum. After the war, he wrote Every Man Dies Alone based on an actual Gestapo file. He died just before its publication in 1947.

"Fallada deserves high praise for having reported so realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life."-Hermann Hesse

"Superb."-Graham Greene

This is the book that led to Hans Fallada's downfall with the Nazis. The story of a young couple struggling to survive the German economic collapse was a worldwide sensation and was made into an acclaimed Hollywood movie produced by Jews, leading Hitler to ban Fallada's work from being translated.

Nonetheless, it remains, as The Times Literary Supplement notes, "the novel of a time in which public and private merged even for those who wanted to stay at home and mind their own business."

"This is an heroic book, brave, fearless and honest. It is necessary reading."-The Sunday Times (London)

"Genuinely tragic and beautiful . . . [Fallada's] perfectly horrifying, horrifyingly perfect novel is the story of himself rejected by society and returning the insult."-New Statesman

Written in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum and discovered after his death, The Drinker may be Hans Fallada's most breath taking piece of craftsmanship. It is an intense yet absorbing study of the descent into drunkenness by an intelligent man who fears he's lost it all. Moving, often funny, and told in a galvanizing bravura style.