Release Date: November 20, 2014
Publisher: Brimstone Corner Press
Size: 6 x 9.25” w/gatefold cover
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-692-25508-7
Booksellers: Email info@rootstockpublishing.com

Synopsis

Five Bullets by Larry Duberstein is an extraordinary historical novel about one man’s experience of the Holocaust from its beginnings in Europe to the end of his life more than fifty years later in the United States.

Every Jew who lived through the Holocaust had a story worth telling, but not every Jew has been inclined to tell that story. Such was the case with Karel Bondy, a rising young structural engineer in Prague when the Nazis invaded his nation and began preparing the fortress town of Terezin to receive his people. Married and the father of three when he was taken there (and from there to Auschwitz), he was alone when luck allowed him to fight back, first with the Partisans and later the Russian army. After the war he came to America to begin a new life as Carl Barry. What these experiences did to a strong yet sensitive man caught in the grip of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy is woven together, in all the horror and sadness and, more unexpectedly, the beauty and humor. Karel Bondy/Carl Barry is an unforgettable character whose story will by turns shock, intrigue, and amuse you.

Praise

“More people learn about the Holocaust from fiction than from anything else, and readers will learn more from Duberstein’s daring, elegant, introspective masterpiece than any other novel I know. Five Bullets is a new page in the career of one of America’s great anti-establishment writers.”

—Theodore Rosengarten, Holocaust scholar, MacArthur Fellow, and National Book Award winning author

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“A tragic, hopeful, finely wrought novel about the possibility of possibility even under impossible circumstances, Larry Duberstein’s Five Bullets offers a heartrending examination of the Holocaust and its aftermath… Haunting as it is compelling, Five Bullets offers an engaging, intelligent meditation on memory, hope, and survival.”

—Small Press Reviews

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“"Duberstein alternates between Karel's life in Europe and Carl's in America, taking readers to the year 2000, when for a dying Carl, past and present begin to merge in a sensitive ending. Through it all, Duberstein treats readers to Karel's introspective, intelligent and ironic view on all that comes to pass. He's a memorable, complex character. ”

—Kirkus Reviews

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“The tremendous success of Duberstein’s story is that Karel’s reclamation takes a lifetime. Duberstein never lets pure horror or momentary beauty disconnect the reader from the story he has to tell. He balances each vignette of this one man’s two lives on a foundation of masterful writing.”

—Foreword Reviews

Meet the Author

Larry Duberstein was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with honors from Wesleyan University and was a Harvard Prize Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Since leaving academia, he has held parallel careers as an author and a builder, having published ten volumes of fiction and dozens of essays and short stories, and having built and remodeled hundreds of houses. In addition to his highly acclaimed fiction, Duberstein is the father of three highly acclaimed daughters. Among other distinctions, Duberstein’s novels have twice been chosen as New York Times Notable Books, and his overall body of work earned him the 2020 Ewing Arts Award in Literature. He lives and works in rural New Hampshire with his companion-in-life Lee Brown.