A Shadow of Myself

Hans, an esteemed surgeon, has just returned from the hellish battlefields of the First World War. But everything in his home feels alien-even his wife Grete. As he tries to regain a sense of normality, he is haunted by nightmarish visions and a profound sense of dissociation. Has the war turned him into someone else? Or has another man wormed his way into Hans's life? Told in a feverish monologue, A Shadow of Myself is a vivid, hallucinatory immersion in an unsettled mind. First published in 1926 and rediscovered in Germany only last year, this lightning-bolt of a war classic is now appearing in English for the first time.



Peter Flamm, whose real name was Erich Mosse, was born in Berlin in 1891 and began writing columns and short stories for the newspapers belonging to his uncle, Rudolf Mosse, while still a medical student. A Shadow of Myself was his debut novel, and it met with huge acclaim when it was first published in 1926. In the following years he published three further novels while continuing to practise as a doctor until, as a Jew, he was forced to flee Germany for Paris in 1933 and on to New York in 1934. He settled there and worked as a psychiatrist. Famous figures like Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin were regular guests at his home. He died in New York in 1963.