What to make of Hans Asperger, the Austrian paediatrician and Nazi collaborator known for his formative research into autism? He took an interest in patients with exceptional abilities but consigned others to the child-killing centre at Am Spiegelgrund. He profited from the progressive ideas of his Jewish colleagues, Georg Frankl and Anni Weiss, without ever directly acknowledging the debt. He remained loyal to his Nazi mentors. After the war he cast himself in the Oskar Schindler role, claiming to have saved his charges from the same death-dealers he continued to commend in interviews.

We now know these were false claims. So does Adelheid Brunner, the protagonist of The Matchbox Girl, who writes to us from the afterlife, where ‘most happily I have access to many documents such as Government Papers, Newspaper Reports, medical Files’. Death also confers on Adelheid the narratively useful ability to travel through space and time. Most of the book takes place in 1930s and 40s Vienna, although Adelheid also visits various American cities, to see how the exiled Frankl and Weiss are getting on, and 1980s London. 

This is not the first time Alice Jolly has given a dead character a voice. The magnificent title story of her collection From Far Around They Saw Us Burn (2023) was collectively narrated by the schoolgirl victims of the 1943 Cavan Orphanage fire in Ireland. Mary Ann Sate, the self-effacing