The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a
well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for
chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in
the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II,
its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the
institution's benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime's euthanasia
program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic's
inhabitants.
Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna
Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The
Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. An absorbing,
emotionally overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The
Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the author's sharp sense of the
absurd. Passionately serious, meticulously researched, and deeply
profound, this extraordinary and dramatic novel bears witness to
oppression and injustice, and offers invaluable and necessary insight
into an intolerable chapter in Austria's past.