Deviation

"Extraordinary" - Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine

"It is not simply d'Eramo's personal story, but also her ruthless quest for self-knowledge, that render Deviation a literary tour de force" - NPR

Lucie has been brought up by bourgeois parents as a passionate young fascist. At the age of eighteen, she decides to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps in Germany. Intending to disprove what she sees as the lies that are being told about Nazi-Fascism, she instead encounters the horrors of life there - and is changed completely. Shedding her identity, she joins a group of deportees being sent to Dachau concentration camp. She escapes the camp in October 1944 and wanders a Germany devastated by allied bombardments.

Translated into English for the first time, Deviationis about the repression of memory, and one woman's attempt to make sense of the hell she has lived through.