UNITED STATES AUTHOR · CHILDREN · FICTION
Alan Gratz
Also known as: Alan M. Gratz, Gratz, Alan
Alan Gratz has wanted to be a writer ever since he was a kid. He went to the University of Tennessee to study creative writing, and ten years and more than sixty-five rejections later he was finally able to get his very first book published. Now Alan is the author of fifteen books for young readers, many of which have won state awards, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and been voted their favorite book of the year by students and librarians. Photo by Wes Stitt
On the evening of December 7, 1941, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill was entertaining dinner guests at Chequers, his official country residence about an hour's drive northwest of London.
— from Allies
Most acclaimed
Prisoner B-3087
From Alan Gratz, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Refugee, comes this wrenching novel about one boy's struggle to survive ten concentration camps during the Holocaust. Based on the inspiring true life story of Jack Gruener. 10 concentration camps. 10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face. As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner -- his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087. He is forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another, as World War II rages all around him. He encounters evil he could have never imagined, but also sees surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror. He just barely escapes death, only to confront it again seconds later. Can Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will -- and, most of all, his sense of who he really is inside? Based on an astonishing true story. Based on the true story by Ruth and Jack Gruener. Ten concentration camps. Ten different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face."
Projekt 1065
It's the height of World War II. Michael O'Shaunessey, son of the Irish ambassador to Nazi Germany, lives with his family in Berlin. But Michael, like his parents, is a spy. He joins the Hitler Youth, taking part in their horrific games and book-burning, despising everything they stand for but using his insider knowledge to bring important information back to his parents and the British Secret Service. When Michael is tasked to find out more about Projekt 1065, a secret Nazi mission, things get even more complicated.
Allies
How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our same hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own? These are difficult questions to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from renowned writers and newcomers, Allies will offer indispensable insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances--be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)--Allies will be indispensable reading for our times. Allies is the first publication of Boston Review's newly inaugurated Arts in Society department. A radical revisioning of the magazine's poetry and fiction, the department unites them--along with cultural criticism and belles lettres--under a project that explores how the arts can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our age, from growing inequality to racial and gender regimes, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world. -- Publisher's website