The internationally bestselling autobiographical novel-a daughter's intimate portrait of her father, a man wounded by war in body and spirit.We called him Vati, Dad. Not Papa. He thought it sounded modern. He wanted to present himself to us, and through us, as a man in tune with the modern age. A man who could be read as having a different past.The second volume in Monika Helfer's award-winning family trilogy uncovers the life of her father Josef. Born with the stigma of illegitimacy, his education was funded by the Catholic Church. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he witnessed the horrors of the Eastern Front and returned from the war an amputee. He married his nurse, and brought his family to the high, idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps, where he took a position as manager of a home for injured soldiers-an isolated place, suspended in time, with a remarkable library.Josef was a man of many mysteries. To his daughter Monika, none is greater than his obsession with this library, his great treasure and secret. In her memory, he will stop at nothing to save it-even when it tears apart his family. Beautifully restrained and compressed, Library for the War-Wounded turns lived experience into great literature by confronting the universal question: can we ever truly know our parents?