All The Broken Places

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past.

Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget.

Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago. Back then, her complicity dishonoured her life, but to interfere now could risk revealing the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting.


All the Broken Places is John Boyne's masterful sequel to his classic bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, taking a character from that novel on a journey to a place she never goes - the past. Through her story, he explores the aftermath of the war and the effects of a lifetime of guilt.

© John Boyne 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • Gripping and well-honed…consummately constructed, humming with tension… a defence of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature and it does so with a novelist’s skill, precision and power

    The Guardian

  • ‘What an incredible feat of storytelling. All the Broken Places is a stark confrontation of evil, an examination of guilt and deflection, and an old-fashioned page-turner. John treads the finest of narrative lines with skill and grace and proves himself yet again to be among the world’s greatest storytellers. ‘

    Donal Ryan

  • An eloquent meditation on guilt, complicity and redemption.. a remarkable novel, with humanity at its core

    Mail on Sunday

  • Beautifully told and gripping from first page to last

    Sunday Express

  • This novel, this exceptional, layered and compelling story, is built on modern history and all of us people who live it. The protagonist, the elderly, forthright and mysterious Mrs. Fernsby, is more than memorable and every one of Boyne’s characters, and every scene, dark or light, is limned in truth and insight. This book moves like a freight train,with force and consequence for the reader.

    Amy Bloom

More from the same

Author

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.