Call the Swallow

by Fergus O'Connell

This first novel is the powerful story of Ariela Steinbaum, a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl in Poland who leaves home to study music in Warsaw. It is 1938, the eve of the Holocaust in Germany, and Nazi power is at its zenith. By 1945 Hitler will have erased European Jews and their culture from the map. This novel shows in searing detail how the Holocaust was, as much as anything else, an industry, with quotas, business meetings, office politics, all the trappings of a grim commercial business. While few were involved in the actual killing, many ordinary people were involved in its administration. What was the impact on people's lives of those extraordinary times? Fifty years later her brother, David, who witnessed the horrifying events, comes searching to find out what happened to her. Interwoven into her story is the horror that affected all as many tried to pretend there was no horror, including the story of Rudolf Fest, a family man with a future in the Gestapo's Department of Statistics.

380 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

My mum read Treasure Island to me when I was four and I think that was when I decided to become a writer.

I used to think I’d like to spend all my time writing, but spending all day alone in a room with your imaginary friends isn’t necessarily the healthiest way to pass the time. (It’s easy to see why so many great writers’ best friend has been the whisky bottle!) So I also write books and teach and speak on project management. I’ve written sixteen non-fiction books and had seven novels published. My most recent, The Paradise Ghetto is now in development based on my own screenplay.

I’ve been shortlisted for prizes – the Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Prize for my first novel, Call The Swallow; in non-fiction, for my book on common sense, Simply Brilliant which was runner-up in the W H Smith Book Awards. My books have been translated into twenty-five languages.

So far, all my novels have been set during wartime but I don’t think of myself as a war novelist. I write about people caught up in great events and how they try to find love in the most difficult of circumstances.

I’m widowed, have two grown-up children and have lived in lots of places. Currently I’m living in England but that could be about to change.