A coming-of-age and falling-in-love story that turns into a war story: a tour de force that reaches from the last golden summer before the Great Depression into the darkest precincts of the twentieth century.             In 1929, at an international youth summit in the Weimar Republic, four young Americans meet various German counterparts on a lovely, remote mountaintop; here they talk earnestly late into the night, quarrel, fall in love and find themselves drawn into political ideals and intrigues that will soon engulf Europe and plunge the world into mayhem. And the fates forged then envelop them again in 1944, when Ingo Miller is running a failing German restaurant in Washington, D.C., and Marty Panich is pushing pencils for the Roosevelt administration. Childhood friends now estranged, they are suddenly reunited when their old friend Isaac Tadziewski--a runaway from Brooklyn back then, and now caught up in the bloody Polish resistance--obtains incendiary information about the Final Solution. The fourth, Sammy Butler, a left-wing journalist riding into the Reich with the Red Army, also learns of Issac’s discovery and embarks on a shadowy quest of his own.             So begins a journey from the confusions of youth into the chaos of war: for Sammy, the horrors of the Eastern Front; for Ingo and Marty, a hastily organized mission that lands them in liberated Yugoslavia and pushes on into Silesia, not far from a place that featured in their Weimar adventures, where Isaac has miraculously survived the Nazi occupation and now faces another destiny altogether.             With masterly command of history, language, politics and warfare, Richard Grant brings to life previously unimagined aspects of this period, as well as characters whose experiences and dreams, hopes and fears are constantly searing, surprising and utterly transformative. With Another Green World, he has created a World War II novel unlike any other. In war-torn Eastern Europe, in 1944, Isaac Tadziewski, a quasi-feral yet inexplicably alluring partisan leader known as the Fox, has unearthed a memo from Heinrich Himmler that unequivocally details Hitler's Final Solution. Martina and Ingo, adolescent compatriots of Isaac, venture to the crumbling eastern front to retrieve the document and thus retain historical proof of the Nazis' atrocities. Meanwhile, Samuel Butler, an American-born journalist working in the employ of the Red Army, is recruited to track down and destroy the same document. And Hagen, SS officer and man hunter, draws ever closer to the hidden Fox for his own dark, unstated purpose. Sporadic flashbacks to 1929 show the five unlikely companions meeting at a German youth summit and forming a complex array of affections and revulsions that will propel them all toward their inevitable reunion. The parallel visions of Germany squarely complement each other: one, idyllic, a limitless promise colored by uncertain menace; the other a world in disarray, tragic and desperate for liberation. But this is not merely about ideological failings. Writing with a relentless yet eloquent command of history and even a compassionate, sly sense of humor, Grant's book delves much deeper than your standard war novel and finds, most startlingly, a superbly nuanced love story of both personal and historical consequence. Ian Chipman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "[An] engaging and illuminating read . . . Mingling German myth and literature with its story line, Richard Grant's Another Green World at times makes you feel that its characters are operating in some menacing Grimm's fairyland." --Roger K. Miller, Philadelphia Inquirer "Eloquent and erudite . . . [ Another Green World ] is a challenging novel whose take on World War II is closer to the surreal dystopia of Thomas Pynchon than to the patriotic valor of Herman Wouk. Though there's action aplenty, Grant uses the disintegration of Europe to probe human relationships and the roots of collective delusions [and] the role played by mythmaking in politics and war." --Ross King, Washington Post Book World "[An] engaging and illuminating read." --Roger K. Miller, Washington Times "Partly a World War II thriller à la The Guns of Navarone , with the death camps of the Holocaust a railroad spur away; partly a gay coming-of-age story; partly a consideration of artistic or aesthetic longing played off the German Romantic poet Novalis' image of the blue flower; partly a greatest-hits list of the German literary canon from Goethe forward; and partly a sketch of the youth movements in the Weimar years, presaging the advent of Nazism . . . Another Green World ponders the specter, perhaps only imagined, of a golden age lost: of youth, of a time before Nazism, of a trueness to self." --Art Winslow, Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review) "Writing with a relentless yet eloquent command of history and even a compassionate, sly sense of humor, Grant's bo