The Requisitions - Paperback

by Samuél Lopez-Barrantes (Author)

"Vivid in a way that is almost tangible ... In spite of its grim subject matter, The Requisitions is a strangely and luminously hopeful novel." Raina Lipsitz, The Metropolitan Review

When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café.

In this ​​​​​​​historical fiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland, a present-day narrator trying to make sense of his past recounts the story of Viktor, a disillusioned academic forced into the Lódź Ghetto, Elsa, a captive Gestapo secretary, and her estranged fiancé, Carl, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.

Inspired by Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, Laurent Binet's HhHH, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, The Requisitions is a deeply researched historical metafiction about the difference between history and memory, and how to remain human during inhumane times.

"Original, deftly crafted, memorable [...] one of those novels that will linger in the mind of the reader longer after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf." James A. Cox, The Midwest Review