A Meal in Winter - Tapa dura

A masterpiece. --'The 50 best winter reads', Independent

This is the most moving book I have read for a long time... Mingarelli's subject matter is supremely dark, but against all the odds, he manages to offer us a positive message. The moral complexity of the story contrasts with its straightforward delivery. Mingarelli's spare language is well suited to this luminous tale, [in which]he accomplishes a great deal. --Independent on Sunday

Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising... This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing. --Herald

This strong and simple story packs a mighty punch. --The Times

Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising... This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing. --Herald

Masterful... Mingarelli offers a new twist on the Holocaust novel. His spare prose, crisply translated by Sam Taylor, adds to the narrative's intensity and keeps you turning the pages until its poignant conclusion. --Huffington Post

Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising... This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing. --Herald

A Meal in Winter delivers a powerful punch and examines the complicity of ordinary soldiers in extraordinary acts of brutality. --'Books of the Year', Tablet

Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising... This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing. --Herald

'Short, powerful, vivid and utterly compelling' --Jewish Chronicle

Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising... This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing. --Herald

'Masterly and necessary... no intervening hand is noticeable in Sam Taylor's rendering of Mingarelli' --Times Literary Supplement

Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising... This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing. --Herald

'Brief, elegant, quietly lyrical yet driven by an inward fire, Minagrelli's novel shows that the fiction of wartime atrocity can still yield treasures' --Boyd Tonkin on the IFFP shortlist, Independent

'This cold, spare novel is a miniature masterpiece and a devastating story. Beautifully translated with clarity and pathos' --Natalie Haynes, judge of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

One morning, in the dead of winter, three German soldiers head out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders to track down and bring back for execution 'one of them' - a Jew. Having flushed out a young man hiding in the woods, they decide to rest in an abandoned house before continuing their journey back to the camp. As they prepare food, they are joined by a passing Pole whose virulent anti-Semitism adds tension to an already charged atmosphere. Before long, the group's sympathies begin to splinter as each man is forced to confront his own conscience as the moral implications of their murderous mission become clear.