Dr Robert Weiss and young Niki Lukasser have a special bond; it was only due to the fact that the doctor was renting a room in the Lukasser’s small Austrian village that he is alive at all for he was born with appendicitis.  Then the war comes and thirteen years later Dr Weiss is a Jew on the run.  The Lukassers repay him by hiding him in their hayloft in a place where nobody will find him – a wooden box just a metre wide, three metres high and four metres long.  This is where he will live for the next two years.  During this time Niki is growing up and suffering the usual pangs of adolescence with his best friend Sigi, a blind girl and of course their mentor…Dr Weiss.

The Diary of Anne Frank meets Whistle Down the Wind!  Moran treats the reader to an intimate delineation of the teenager’s world, a place of burgeoning sexual awareness, petty cruelties and a half-understood picture of the responsibilities of adulthood.  All this is set against the backdrop of wartime Austria – rumors of concentration camps and other atrocities and the casual brutalities of the people around who have been swept up in the Nazi dream.  The fact that it is told in Niki’s own words gives the account an immediacy that any amount of literary language would not have achieved.  The extraordinary situation of Dr Weiss seems to be a mirror of those extraordinary times when average people were forced to step outside themselves and find different ways of living.

I found this to be a most well-written and clearly realised novel.  Moran is an author with a great future ahead of him if he keeps up this high standard.