Lost

"Lost" is an extraordinarily moving, unnerving and often very funny first novel set in post WWII Germany. The narrator is a young boy who is told that his parents, while escaping East Germany to the west ran into a troop of Russians and his mother fearing that she, her husband and Arnold, their first born, would be shot, shoved her child into the arms of a passing woman who disappeared immediately in the tide of refugees. Neither father nor mother were shot and they are faced with the terrible realisation that Arnold's life was never really in danger.