Peeling the Onion

A compelling memoir. The emotions unleashed are raw... It is with extreme eloquence that he can finally excavate the silences at the heart of his life

Anita Sethi, New Statesman

A memoir of rare literary beauty

New Yorker

A wonderful book, full of life, full of love, vibrant and uncompromising and as picaresque and varied as all his finest works... As a portrait of a young boy and young man alive in Germany through its most devastating decades, it will stand as a factual masterpiece... an astonishing tour de force

Carmen Callil

An exquisitely constructed narrative... Peeling the Onion is a genuine masterpiece

Independent on Sunday

An ingenious but treacherous text that glides constantly between past and present, first and third person, memory and imagination

Evening Standard

As a demonstration of a literary will, the novelist's last testament, it is in many ways a masterpiece

Observer

As a writer, his influence still looms large, and Peeling the Onion is a reminder why. It has that same imaginative accuracy that made The Tin Drum a bestseller

The Times

Grass's profound and moving memoir [has] an unforgettable power, and it is not just the significance of his experiences, but the virtuosity of his writing which elevates Peeling the Onion over any memoir published in recent years

Daily Telegraph

He peels his particular onion with the candour and irony that have shaped his fabulist fiction for close on 50 years and this beautifully gruff, no-nonsense account of his early life is direct and conversational, though not without jolts of profoundly human remorse

Irish Times

Much of this memoir is painfully honest, and the confessions in it are clearly written from the heart

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday Book of the Week

This subtle and expertly written book is really a memoir about forgetting

Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times