To Greet the Sun

ONE LIFE. TWO HEROIC ACTS, HALF A CENTURY APART. Otto Eisinger, an elderly German émigré living alone in Brazil, attempts to thwart a pair of armed robbers and is savagely beaten. While he is convalescing in hospital, the media get hold of the CCTV footage and the old man unknowingly becomes a national hero. Otto is visited in the ward by his housekeeper's grandson, Pietro, a young journalist eager to understand the source of his extraordinary bravery. In a morphine-induced haze, and prompted by the uncanny resemblance between Pietro and Siggi, his closest friend in the Hitler Youth, Otto begins to relive memories that he has spent a lifetime suppressing – and whose meaning he has still not fully understood. To Greet the Sun offers a compelling, psychologically nuanced portrait of a man born in Germany in 1929 – a man whose childhood was spent in the suffocating embrace of the Nazi regime, and who, aged fifteen, was willing to risk his life to defend the Führer. It is a story of kindness and courage as well as of guilt, and of an unlikely friendship that bridges continents and generations.