Omega Minor
By Paul Verhaegen
Dalkey Archive Press £9.99
FT bookshop price: £7.99

The first English translation of Paul Verhaegen’s beautiful, poetic novel is almost a masterpiece. Certainly in the first two sections the reader is inexorably drawn into an epic story of modern history. The roaring twenties, Hitler’s rise, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and the cold war are all recounted against a backdrop of Berlin in 1995, a city caught up in postmodern cultural tensions.