A Whole Life, by Robert Seethaler

 This is not one of my Mr B's subscription books - it's a book I suggested for a recent meeting of the book group I belong to. We wanted a short book for this session, and A Whole Life fitted that bill

My copy is a hardback, and it's rather lovely - I like the design of the cover, which is in white, black, and soft shades of green. The image looks to me like the sea, with heaving, foam-flecked waves. But it isn't the sea, it's a mountain. On the top of it is an alpine hut, and if you look carefully, you can see about a third of the way up a tiny figure of a climber wearing a backpack. He isn't noticeable, but there he is: he has a long way to go, but he's climbing steadily up.

And that really reflects the story. Andreas Eggar is born in a mountain valley. (Seethaler was born in Austria, so I think we can place the valley there.) An orphan, at the age of four he is put into the care of an uncle, a farmer called Kranzstocker, a cruel man whose only interest in the boy is how much work he can get out of him. He beats the child for the smallest of transgressions - spilt milk, a mistake in an evening prayer. One time. he beats him too hard and smashes the bone in his leg, as a result of which Andreas has a lifelong limp.

So Andreas has a tough, even brutal life from the beginning. Even when he marries, and seems at last to have found happiness, fate - and the mountain - intervenes. When he goes to fight, he is captured and held by the Russians for several years after the war has ended. But somehow, it's not a sad book. He never forgets his wife and no-one ever replaces her, but he just keeps on, like the figure on the cover image trudging up the mountain. When he returns from Russia, things have moved on and his old job with a cable car company no longer exists - so he simply finds something else to do, somewhere else to live. He is immensely stoical. He keeps on keeping on, because really, that's all you can do.

Before I went to my book group meeting, I knew that I liked the book, but I couldn't articulate why. But as we talked, it emerged that several of us had been through tough times lately. One of us had recently lost her father, and she talked about that, and how it had been. She said that yes, of course it was tragic - but everyone has tragedies in their life. And in the end, like Andreas Eggar, the thing you have to do is keep on. I talked about my fear of heights: she remembered climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. She wasn't a mountaineer, she said: "But really, it's remarkable what you can do if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other." (If anyone's read my book Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, you may remember that that's exactly what Jack has to learn, when he finds out, while plant-hunting in the Himalayas, that he is - inconveniently - afraid of heights: you must just keep putting one foot in front of the other.)

So, I think that's what chimes with readers of A Whole Life. Here is a man, a very ordinary man in terms of possessions and achievements, who has nevertheless triumphed and, in the end, lived a life he's pleased with. He's known the beauty of nature - and he's also known its cruelty. He's known love - but he's also known loss. And yet, despite all life's thrown at him, he's just kept going. 

The Tobacconist, by Robert Seethaler

Robert Seethaler is an Austrian living in Berlin. His previous, very successful book, A Whole Life, is the story of a simple man who lived in the mountains, only leaving them to go to war. You might expect the main part of the book to be about his experience of war, because surely that's the obvious, the most dramatic bit to choose to write about; but no. As the title suggests, it's about the whole of his life - which isn't packed with incident (though there is one tragic occurrence): it's essentially a quiet life.

This strikes a chord with me. I've often been told that my own books are too quiet - and I can see that there's some justice in this. Bernard Cornwell and I have both written books about Alfred the Great and his daughter Aethelflaed. He's written a whole series, which have sold in squillions and been made into a successful TV series. I've written one book, originally intended for teenagers (Warrior King, since you ask) and a short story in an anthology, which didn't sell in squillions. The Last Kingdom, Cornwell's book, has bucketsful of gore, lots of drama, and a gorgeous hero. Mine has some jolly nice people, one cracking villain, a silver-eyed magic lady, a sensitive hero troubled by doubt, and rather less gore. It's pretty easy to draw a lesson from this - yet I'm still drawn to subtle stories about quiet people. I suppose the trick is to write them so well that the drama is just as powerful, despite the lack of Sturm und Drang - sorry, just showing off that I did German at school - it means 'storm and stress'. And it does link back to Seethaler - rather neatly, though I says it as shouldn't - because Seethaler writes compellingly about ordinary people - quiet people - and the moments which affect and change them.

In An Ordinary Life, he writes beautifully about how his protagonist falls in love - but this is only a part of his life, though it is a very significant one. The things that happen in the wider world have an effect on his life, of course - but they are merely a backdrop to it. In The Tobacconist, what is happening in the wider world is much more intense - because the book begins in 1937 and most of the action takes place in Vienna. The hero, 17 year-old Franz, at the beginning is living a comfortable, rather spoilt life in a village by a lake with his mother. But then his mother's 'protector' dies in an accident and money is suddenly short. So Franz is sent off to be an apprentice to an old friend of his mother's, a tobacconist in Vienna. Franz, a simple and open character, copes surprisingly well with life in the city. He enjoys his work, gets on well with his rather crusty employer, makes friends with one of the customers, a certain Professor Freud, and falls in love with an unsuitable girl.

But Jews are welcome customers at the shop, and the Gestapo come calling. When the tobacconist is arrested, Franz feels he must protest.

Like An Ordinary Life, The Tobacconist is a short book. It doesn't have a complicated structure, it doesn't have a huge cast of characters, there is no big secret to be revealed, not much by way of twists or turns, no horrifying accounts of torture or interrogation. Yet it works - the story grips. Ordinary lives have their own drama; we all have a story to tell. Only we aren't all good at telling it. Seethaler is.