All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
Rebecca Donner
Available as Paperback, eBook
The thrilling and previously unknown story of the woman who led one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany, now a New York Times bestseller
SELECTED AS A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
A SUNDAY TIMES BEST PAPERBACK OF 2022
Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six and living in Germany when she witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. She began holding secret meetings in her apartment, forming a small band of political activists set on helping Jews escape, denouncing Hitler and calling for revolution. When the Second World War began, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies.
In this astonishing work of non-fiction, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on extensive archival research, fusing elements of biography, political thriller and scholarly detective story to tell a powerful, epic tale of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
“Reads like a thriller … Written in a pacey, suspenseful present tense, it’s biography with a pulse … a superb, sure-footed work of historical detection conceived with a powerful intelligence”
sunday Times
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“Astonishing … wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography … a real-life thriller with a cruel ending”
new York Times
“A beautifully rich portrait of a very brave woman. While never less than scrupulously researched, this biography explodes the genre of “biography”: experimental but achieved, Donner’s story reads with the speed of a thriller, the depth of a novel and the urgency of an essay, like some deeply compelling blend of Alan Furst and W.G. Sebald”
James Wood
“Donner questions what motivates someone to risk their life for the sake of their beliefs in a gripping story that reads like a political thriller”
observer
“Written in a fizzing present tense, the book in places reads like a spy novel … Donner writes in beautiful, crisp prose (like her great-great-aunt, as quotes from Mildred’s letters reveal) … The result is a work that transports us to a period now slipping from living memory but that contains vital lessons for our own time”
herald
Rebecca Donner
Rebecca Donner is a 2023-2024 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and was recently a Visiting Scholar at Oxford. Her third book is the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, a deeply researched fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and the Chautauqua Prize. In 2022, Rebecca Donner was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
@RRRDonner | rebeccadonner.com