The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young photographer in Berlin in the 1930s who uses his craft to express his patriotic fervour; Lore, a 12-year-old girl who in 1945 guides her young siblings across a devastated Germany after her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies; and, 50 years later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his loving grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.

Rachel Seiffert’s first novel, The Dark Room, won a Betty Trask Award and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a feature film called Lore. Seiffert has also received a David T. K. Wong award from PEN International for her work.