Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

In Bob Van Laerhoven’s The Long Farewell, in 1934, Dresden, fifteen-year-old Hermann Becht's family is affected by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. His father, Hans, serves the Nazi movement with growing devotion, while his mother, Marina, a Belarusian refugee who escaped revolutionary Russia, believes Germany is moving toward catastrophe. Hermann’s understanding of the world changes after he meets Carla Kienholz, the daughter of a persecuted modernist artist whose family is under increasing suspicion from Nazi authorities. Their secret relationship places Hermann between the political system that defines his father’s ambitions and the people targeted by that same ideology. After a violent attack destroys Carla’s family, Hermann carries the psychological aftermath into adulthood as Europe moves toward war. His path leads him from Dresden into exile in Paris before drawing him into intelligence operations connected to Nazi Germany, forcing him to confront his father’s transformation alongside his own uncertain sense of identity.

Bob Van Laerhoven’s The Long Farewell treats prewar Europe with the patience of a writer who understands that ideology enters ordinary life by degrees before consuming it outright. The author is brilliant in his sharply observed historical details, especially during the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, when Hans Becht abandons one branch of Nazi power for another with the cold instinct of a survivor sensing where favor now lives. The author presents fascism as something intimate that enters apartments, lecture halls, and family conversations, then slowly alters the moral temperature of each room. Hermann Becht carries the story because his artistic ambitions leave him slightly out of step with the brutality pressing on him. Marina also leaves a lasting impression through her exile from Belarus. This novel offers intelligence, historical authority, and human feeling, earning its recommendation. Readers drawn toward literary historical fiction should find themselves lingering over its moral unease long afterward.