A Writer's Life

 This is an important, powerful book based on exhaustive research. It’s narrated through the eyes of a mute neuro-divergent girl kept in a secure children’s hospital in 1930s Vienna, which, like today, is a time of great political upheaval. ‘Important Facts’ are recorded by Adelheid Brunner in her notebooks, but ‘the Facts are most Unruly’ and are twisted and distorted by those who live between what she calls the Red Terror and the Brown Terror. There is too much misinformation and disinformation, and just believing something can make you a criminal. The only truth Adelheid knows is what she sees and hears and she records it all. She wants to be ‘Properly Informed’, but is aware that she is not Appropriate. That, she writes ‘is a club for which they never tell you the Rules and therefore you cannot join.’ Adelheid is one of the children being studied by Dr Asperger as part of his research into ‘autistic-psychopathy’. His research is now tainted by his association with the Nazis, bu...