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  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141968094
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 496

Once a Jailbird



A thrilling, comic and dark novel of the life of a petty criminal, from the author of Alone in Berlin

For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco - and dreaming of the day of his release.

Then he gets out.

As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a job and even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation and deceit, and with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making...

Hans Fallada's dark and moving 1934 novel brilliantly describes a seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives and violent deeds, showing how our actions always catch up with us.

  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141968094
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 496

About the author

Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada (1893–1947) was the pen name of German author Rudolf Ditzen, whose books were international bestsellers on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. He opted to stay in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and eventually had a nervous breakdown when he was put under pressure to write anti-Semitic books. He was cast into a Nazi insane asylum, where he secretly wrote The Drinker. Immediately after the war he wrote his last two novels, The Nightmare and Alone in Berlin, but he died before either book could be published.

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Praise for Once a Jailbird

Fallada is a unique novelist, a writer of great sweetness and charm whom historical circumstances forced to take an interest in violent turmoil

Philip Hensher, Independent