Julian Farris

Again The Dimming Lights by Julian Farris 

AGAIN THE DIMMING LIGHTS follows two German compatriots caught in the crossfire of family loyalty and the shattering events in 1930s Germany awakening under the Nazis.

Markus Hoffner is heir to a German railroad, vital to Nazi rearmament. He is also gay in a Germany of contradictions—The Hirschfeld Institute of Sexual Science with groundbreaking studies in human sexuality and the world’s first successful transgender procedures, but also a Germany awakening under the Nazis.

Markus and fellow compatriot Alex von Statt arrive in Oxford on Rhodes Scholarships, considered by many the most prestigious academic award in the world, a distinction that will earn them prime membership in the Nazi Party on their return, and enable them to work against it from within. But their relationships with a young American from Arkansas and an ambitious woman journalist derail their plan, forcing them to choose between abandoning family and country through expatriation or remaining to oppose Hitler’s escalating grip on the country. Markus’ serendipitous encounter in a Berlin bar with a familiar stranger from his past—a transgender woman with her own plan of defiance—reignites his resolve, while Alex’s appointment in the Nazi hierarchy as a jurist leads him into a self-imposed trap of collusion.

In the spirit of Anthony Doerr’s ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, John Boyne’s THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES and Christopher Isherwood’s classic, THE BERLIN STORIES, the turbulent 1930s form the backdrop of my 76,000-word upmarket novel, AGAIN THE DIMMING LIGHTS.

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