LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2026
FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE DARK ROOM AND A BOY IN WINTER

'This fine novel investigates the fate of displaced people in the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war' GUARDIAN

'Marvellous . . . a wide-ranging novel that beautifully balances the tumultuous reach of history with the everyday concerns of ordinary people' DAILY MAIL

'Powerful . . . Seiffert's writing beautifully captures this devastating moment of history' SPECTATOR

'The patron saint of this gripping novel is Bertolt Brecht. This is a fascinating novel by one of our very best writers' JEWISH CHRONICLE

To be truly alive means having to make choices. To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love.

Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers - forced labourers - fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall. The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands.

Peace brings more soldiers - but English this time - and Red Cross staff officers. Ruth, on her first posting from London, is given charge of a refugee camp on the heathland, crowded with former forced labourers. As ever more keep arriving, she hears whispers, rumours of dark secrets about that snowy night.

The townspeople close ranks, shutting their mouths and minds to the winter's events, but the town children are curious about the refugees on their doorstep, and Benno can't carry his secret alone.

'A complex, intelligent, deeply compassionate novel about the unglamorous aftermath of war . . . A brilliant piece of story-telling' ANDREW MILLER, author of THE LAND IN WINTER

'This entire novel reverberates in ways that only haunt the reader more and more deeply, long after its last page' PAUL HARDING, author of THIS OTHER EDEN

'She has brought to life a complex interaction between survivors on both sides with humanity and compassion' LINDA GRANT, author of THE STORY OF THE FOREST

"Robert Seethaler, Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Doerr have played with the heroic narrative of resistance figures . . . few have surveyed this murky territory as well as the British author Rachel Seiffert. Seiffert is skilled at invoking characters stricken by conflicting loyalties to family and country, as well as between notions of justice and forgiveness . . . In its depiction of random violence and random kindness, Seiffert's book is humane and horribly believable. It is also a crime novel in the sense that To Kill a Mockingbird is a crime novel. One in which a whole community is culpable" - Financial Times

"Marvellous . . . Seiffert juggles a very large cast with immense skill in a wide-ranging novel that beautifully balances the tumultuous reach of history with the everyday concerns of ordinary people" - Daily Mail

"The fine fifth novel from the German-British author Rachel Seiffert . . . [who] is drawn to small figures on a big canvas. Her subjects are the everyday casualties of 20th-century European history and the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war. Once the Deed Is Done stirs memories of the centrepiece tale from Seiffert's Booker-shortlisted debut, The Dark Room with its depiction of a people cast adrift, struggling to find a route home . . . Seiffert has cited Joseph Roth - that great chronicler of mittel-European dislocation - as a literary influence. She writes in a similar fashion . . . a direct approach serves the characters well, brings this straitened and provisional world to life and provides a bedrock of basic humanity." - Guardian

"The patron saint of this gripping novel is Bertolt Brecht. This is a fascinating novel by one of our very best writers" - Jewish Chronicle

"Searingly beautiful . . . powerful . . . Seiffert's writing beautifully captures this devastating moment of history, full of pain and horror, shame, trauma and grief. But there is resilience, too" - Spectator