Hotschnig

A gripping, deeply moving novel about one man’s search for truth and identity in the long shadow of war.

Heinz Fitz has only one tangible clue to his past: a worn piece of paper from the SS-Lebensborn program, a Nazi initiative designed to promote so-called racial purity. His mother, a Norwegian woman, fell in love with the wrong man--an Austrian soldier--during the German occupation. Betrayed and abandoned, she fled to Austria, only to be turned away by his family. Branded a collaborator in her homeland and a pariah in a foreign land, she was left to survive as best she could. Now, years later, her son is determined to piece together the fragments of his origins.

But every answer leads to more questions, and as he unearths painful truths, an alternative story--one of resilience, love, and survival--emerges from the darkness. Inspired by real events, Alois Hotschnig’s novel is both a fierce reckoning with history and a poignant tribute to a mother’s strength. A masterful meditation on memory and storytelling, My Mother’s Silver Fox asks whether the past can ever truly be understood--or if it will always slip through our grasp, like snow through our fingers.

Alois Hotschnig is an award-winning Austrian writer whose works have been translated into several languages. He is based in Innsbruck. Tess Lewis’s numerous translations from French and German include works by Peter Handke, Jean-Luc Benoziglio, Klaus Merz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Pascal Bruckner.