West Berlin in 1989.
Eighteen-year-old Ralf has just left school and is living a final golden summer with his three best friends. They spend their days swimming, smoking and daydreaming about the future, oblivious to the storm gathering on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
But an unsettling discovery about his family and a meeting with the mysterious Oz shatters everything Ralf thought he knew about love and loyalty.
And as old Cold War tensions begin to tear his life apart, he finds himself caught up in a web of deceit, forced to make impossible choices about his country, his family and his heart.
An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson is published on 4 July, 2019.
Ben’s debut novel, The Spring of Kasper Meier, won the 2017 HWA Debut Crown award and he chaired the judges’ panel for the same award in 2018.
Read his Historia article How to Write a Historical Debut: A Cautionary Tale.
