A coming-of-age and falling-in-love story that turns into a war story: a tour de force that reaches from the last golden summer before the Great Depression into the darkest precincts of the twentieth century.

            In 1929, at an international youth summit in the Weimar Republic, four young Americans meet various German counterparts on a lovely, remote mountaintop; here they talk earnestly late into the night, quarrel, fall in love and find themselves drawn into political ideals and intrigues that will soon engulf Europe and plunge the world into mayhem. And the fates forged then envelop them again in 1944, when Ingo Miller is running a failing German restaurant in Washington, D.C., and Marty Panich is pushing pencils for the Roosevelt administration. Childhood friends now estranged, they are suddenly reunited when their old friend Isaac Tadziewski--a runaway from Brooklyn back then, and now caught up in the bloody Polish resistance--obtains incendiary information about the Final Solution. The fourth, Sammy Butler, a left-wing journalist riding into the Reich with the Red Army, also learns of Issac’s discovery and embarks on a shadowy quest of his own.

            So begins a journey from the confusions of youth into the chaos of war: for Sammy, the horrors of the Eastern Front; for Ingo and Marty, a hastily organized mission that lands them in liberated Yugoslavia and pushes on into Silesia, not far from a place that featured in their Weimar adventures, where Isaac has miraculously survived the Nazi occupation and now faces another destiny altogether.

            With masterly command of history, language, politics and warfare, Richard Grant brings to life previously unimagined aspects of this period, as well as characters whose experiences and dreams, hopes and fears are constantly searing, surprising and utterly transformative. With Another Green World, he has created a World War II novel unlike any other.

"This debut novel from Maine journalist Grant, 54, opens in 1944, as minor Roosevelt administration bureaucrat Martina Panich discovers the existence of a document showing that the Nazis are systematically killing Jews by the millions. Although the Final Solution is not news to the government, a lack of incontrovertible evidence has allowed Allied inaction up to this point (to move on it would have been politically unpopular). Intelligence points to the document's being in the hands of a Pole, Isaac the Fox, whom Martina and her childhood friend, Ingo Miller, met during a youth summit in Germany in 1929 — and who has his own reasons for hanging on to it. With Ingo's help, she forms a team of Jewish commandos — the Varian Fry Brigade, made up of mostly ordinary people — and has them rapidly trained for insertion into Germany, where they are to find Isaac, capture the document and bring it back. Reminiscent at moments of some of the best of the WWII thrillers, Grant's debut gets mired in multiple characters, in repeated plot and time shifts, and in digressions covering naturalism, German poetry, music and the politics of the period. The author intrudes (often addressing the reader in the second person), and even minors characters go off on declamatory tangents. Grant is trying to offer a Herman Wouk — style epic, but he never quite gets it off the ground." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[An] engaging and illuminating read . . . Mingling German myth and literature with its story line, Richard Grant's Another Green World at times makes you feel that its characters are operating in some menacing Grimm's fairyland."

--Roger K. Miller, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Eloquent and erudite . . . [Another Green World] is a challenging novel whose take on World War II is closer to the surreal dystopia of Thomas Pynchon than to the patriotic valor of Herman Wouk. Though there's action aplenty, Grant uses the disintegration of Europe to probe human relationships and the roots of collective delusions [and] the role played by mythmaking in politics and war."

--Ross King, Washington Post Book World

"[An] engaging and illuminating read."

--Roger K. Miller, Washington Times

"Partly a World War II thriller à la The Guns of Navarone, with the death camps of the Holocaust a railroad spur away; partly a gay coming-of-age story; partly a consideration of artistic or aesthetic longing played off the German Romantic poet Novalis' image of the blue flower; partly a greatest-hits list of the German literary canon from Goethe forward; and partly a sketch of the youth movements in the Weimar years, presaging the advent of Nazism . . . Another Green World ponders the specter, perhaps only imagined, of a golden age lost: of youth, of a time before Nazism, of a trueness to self."

--Art Winslow, Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review)

"Writing with a relentless yet eloquent command of history and even a compassionate, sly sense of humor, Grant's book delves much deeper than your standard war novel and finds, most startlingly, a superbly nuanced love story of both personal and historical consequence."

--Ian Chipman, Booklist, starred review

“I read Another Green World with both wonder and awe. Its scope and sweep are breathtaking, its understanding of human nature both mysterious and profound, its heart and empathy exhilarating."

–Richard Russo

“Another Green World is unlike any other World War II novel I’ve ever read. At times it made me think of Thomas Mann, at other times Graham Greene. In the end, though, the voice and the vision are all Richard Grant’s, and it’s important to remember that name, because you will be hearing it a lot in the months ahead. This book is an original work of art.”

–Steve Yarbrough

With a masterful command of history, Richard Grant re-creates the darkest heart of the 20th century, telling the story of four Americans who meet at youth summit in Germany, and journey from the confusions of youth to the chaos of war, as revelations about the Final Solution come to light.

Richard Grant was born in Norfolk in 1952, attended the University of Virginia, and served in the U.S. Coast Guard. He lives in Rockport, Maine, where he has been a contributing editor of Down East magazine, chaired the literature panel of the Maine Arts Commission, and won a New England Journalism Award for his column in the Camden Herald.