It begins, promisingly, in a balmy Harvard dorm, where Anna should really be revising for her exams. Christoph is handsome. He plays the piano; he talks philosophy. He is German, though, and Anna’s two roommates, both Jewish, are upset. ‘Of course it’s not his fault,’ says one. ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about history. I’m talking about genocide.’ The Scrapbook, Heather Clark’s debut novel, charts the tumultuous romance between Anna and Christoph. What does it mean, she asks, to love someone whose grandfather was complicit in the Holocaust?

In sections written in the third person, we follow Hans and Wilhelm, Christoph’s grandfathers, and Anna’s grandfather Jack. We learn of the young Germans’ stints in the Wehrmacht and Jack’s capture of the Kehlsteinhaus, a Nazi retreat outside Berchtesgaden. In other sections, Anna describes the unfolding of her romance with Christoph across fault lines of inheritance. Christoph is haunted by the question of how his country should remember its actions. On romantic daytrips across Germany, he and Anna talk of little else. He speaks to her of Habermas and his theories of remembrance: ‘He says our history must remain painful. And that even those born after the war are in a way responsible for it. He says that because we grew up in a society that supported the Nazis, we have the potential to fall back into that… abyss.’

Methods of memorialisation vie throughout The Scrapbook. On a visit to Dachau, Anna reads a love poem by Tadeusz Borowski, written when he was imprisoned in the camp. Then she thinks of Adorno: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Clark, in prose at the same time richly philosophical and