Young Adolf by Beryl Bainbridge (1978, to be reissued by Open Road Media)

Dame Beryl Bainbridge is regarded as one of the greatest and most prolific British novelists of her generation. Consistently praised by critics, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and twice won the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year.   She was born in Liverpool in 1932 and died in London in 2010.

Beryl Bainbridge On The Reading Life

Works Read to Date

Harriet Said

The Bottle Factory Outing

According to Queenie

Young Adolf

Berly Bainbridge is a tremendously imaginative and empathetic writer.  In the four novels inhale so far had the great pleasure of reading she had entered the scary mind set of young teenage girls, the blue collar world of female employees at a bottle factory, Samuel Johnson and the Thrales, and the experiences of a young Adolf Hitler on an imagined by Bainbridge working vacation in England.

Young Adolf takes us to a time after World War One and before Hitler began to be politically active.  When we meet him he is staying in England with his half brother and his sister in law.  No mention is ever made of what he will become.  His half brother gets Adolf a job as a helper and errand runner at a beautiful hotel.  At first young Adolf feels degraded to work for small tips but soon he begins to enjoy working in the hotel.  His sister in law resents him living there with them and not chipping in for expenses, I had a grim laugh when she said that Adopf " will never amount to anything".  More than anything else the novel is a portrayal of working class British life in the 1920s.  Adolf does express his political views but everyone just ignores him.  He complains about being rejected by an art school, about WW I and his parents.  

Young Adolf is a very creative work, presenting a very believable young Adolf in an excellently realized setting.

I enjoyed it a lot.

If you have a favorite novel by Bainbridge please let us know. 

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