SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE AND LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022.

He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea. Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine - the authentic experience. Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place - one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.

But the people who live on this rock - three miles long and half-a-mile wide - have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Soft summer days pass, and the islanders are forced to question what they value and what they desire.

As the autumn beckons, and the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.

A finalist for the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction "Impressive. Magee's terse style, cross-cutting between the narratives of Katharina and Peter, generates its own tension and momentum."--New York Times Book Review "Bare, brutal...told with a sharply focused simplicity that both exposes and condemns through its understatement."--Kirkus Reviews Lauded by New York Times bestselling writer Chris Cleave as "outstanding" and finalist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, The Undertaking is a remarkable debut novel from enticing new voice in fiction, Audrey Magee. Set during World War II amid the trenches of the Eastern front and the turmoil of Berlin under the Third Reich, The Undertaking follows the lives of an ordinary German soldier Peter Faber, as he approaches Stalingrad, and his new wife, Katharina Spinell, who, goaded on by her delusional parents, ruthlessly works her way into Nazi high society with tragic consequences. This is an unforgettable and elegant novel of marriage, ambition, and the brutality of war from one of our finest new writers. "This is a devastating but quite stunning first novel."--Minneapolis Star Tribune "A bold, honest novel about Nazi greed and moral blankness...Magee's cool, precise tone recalls Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, and, like Heinrich Boell, Magee is haunted by the everyday and the small people who are inseparably part of a great ravagement."--Helen Dunmore, The Guardian (UK)

The debut novel by the author of The Colony, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize A soldier on the Russian Front marries a photograph of a woman he has never met. Hundreds of miles away in Berlin, the woman marries a photograph of the soldier. It is a contract of business rather than love. When the newlywed strangers finally meet, however, passion blossoms and they begin to imagine a life together under the bright promise of Nazi Germany. But as the tide of war turns and Allied enemies come ever closer, the couple find themselves facing the terrible consequences of being ordinary people stained with their small share of an extraordinary guilt...