A german soldier's desire to escape the Eastern Front in 1941 drives this debut novel by Audrey Magee, an Irish journalist. Peter Faber enlists the services of a marriage bureau and weds a girl he has never met in order to get home leave. His father dismisses the match as a "Nazi breeding stunt". The novel's title has overtones of equivocation, too. The work is in English, but "undertaking" is the literal translation of the German "Un-ternehmen", which also conveys "operation" in the military sense. Despite their bureaucratic introduction, Faber and 22-year-old Katharina Spinell fall in love.
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