Ask Sarah Gross

In 1968, Kimberly Parker, a young Literature teacher travels across the United States to teach in the most exclusive New England school headed by Sarah Gross, a charismatic and mysterious woman. She is running away from a terrible secret and is seeking to find her peace at St. Oswald’s in the company of exuberant Miranda, of the charming and sensitive Clement and especially with Sarah’s complicity. But the truth haunts Kimberly even there, and on the day she makes the decision that might have saved her, a tragedy suddenly upsets the centennial institution, revealing a devastating past. No matter where, whether in the university’s corridors or in the crammed ghetto in Krakow; whether under the poplars’ shade in Birkenau or on the streets of Auschwitz, when it was still a happy city, Kimberly becomes submerged in a brutal story of grief and survival for which she had never been prepared. Rigorous, imaginative and profoundly cinematographic, with masterful dialogues and unforgettable characters, “Ask Sarah Gross” is a vibrant novel revealing the city which has become the most famous extermination camp in History. This novel was a finalist for the LeYa Book Award- 2014.

After many years of research, of spending several weeks in the former camps of Auschwitz, of working closely with some of the most prominent experts on the Holocaust and former prisoners, and after long hours of interviews in the streets of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) and Krakow, João Pinto Coelho offers us a novel that uncovers the place that became the most eloquent symbol of human iniquity. From Krakow to Oswiecim, through Gottingen in Germany or Shelton and New York in the United States, Ask Sarah Gross has been unanimously praised by the critics and has been received with boundless and unexpected enthusiasm among readers, considering it is a debut novel. Only four months after its publication in 2015, the book is now in its third edition.