I very much liked revisiting the world that Helfer had described in Last House Before the Mountain and enjoyed dropping back into her prose and her story telling.
I think that this book does need to be read after Last House as that informs so much of the mood of this one.

Well written and enjoyable historical fiction, with a real focus on characters and emotions. I really enjoyed this one, it was so lovely and heartwarming to read.

Library for the War Wounded is a beautiful and touching 'memoir' - fiction based on the author's own life experiences. Moniker Helfer is an Austrian author whose award-winning book has been translated into English for the first time. It is the second in a trilogy of war-time memories and the impact of the war on people's lives.

Father - Vati, not Papa or Father, as he thought Vati sounded more modern - is Josef, an illegitimate child from Salzberg, who lost a leg in the war when he was sent to Russia to fight. On his return, having married his nurse, Grete, he becomes the director of a home for injured soldiers. It's high in the Austrian Alps, isolated and remote, and there he begins to amass a vast library. It's here on the mountain that he buries himself and his family, while the repercussions of the war are felt by each of them.

The stream of consciousness through the book doesn't allow for chapters. It's more like reading the narrator's journal as she seeks answers to some of her questions - who are my parents, particularly my father? What has caused him to be the way he is? Why has he chosen to almost hide away in this place and to concentrate on his books? And why does he eventually squirrel them away?

Seeking to understand what has made our parents into the people they are is always difficult, sometime painful, often enlightening. This book considers the narrator's father; it's a concentrated and occasionally confusing account as there are some flashbacks inserted into the narrative. Overall, it's a gripping account of a WWII veteran and how his own traumas from his early life and especially from the war have impacted him and through him, his family. Which also then asks the question, can we inherit trauma?

I enjoyed this so much that I now want to read the other two books in the trilogy.

My thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for allowing me to read the Advanced Reader Copy. I'm very glad to have read this!