The Road Through Tannenbruck

About this book

In the Allgäu of the late fifteenth century, the mountains stand over the village of Tannenbruck like old judges. Bruno is the cooper's second son - the one who will not inherit the shop. He grows up among plum trees and churchyard rules, under a father's mallet and an older brother's guarded tools, in a village where news travels by the well and every family's business is common property by noon.Then the road takes him.Bruno leaves Tannenbruck for the artillery train, where powder is guarded like treasure and feared like sin, and where a cooper's eye for wood turns out to be worth something after all. Under Meister Eberhart he learns the trade of the great guns: the patience, the lists, the ropes and wedges, the slow dull labor of making dangerous things safe. He learns what a wall sounds like when it decides to fall. He learns what men do to a town once the wall is open, and what it means to have opened it.Across twenty years of service he gathers what a soldier gathers - comrades, scars, a wife from a foreign country, and the names of dead men he still keeps. And when the road finally bends back toward the village he left, Bruno returns not as the cooper's boy but as a man with a name of his own.The Road Through Tannenbruck is a novel about work and inheritance, about the difference between the men who break walls and the men who go through them, and about the long question of whether a road ever really ends where you thought it would. It moves at the pace of the century it describes - through cooperages and camps, sieges and inns, funerals and fires - with an eye for the ordinary labor that history usually forgets.