In 1944, the Russian tanks plunged into Germany, and German soil crunched under the tread of Nazi infantry. The once-mighty Nazi army, demoralized and disintegrating, fled before the invader.

War - its stark horror, its mass destruction of human life and the human spirit - is the theme of Adam, Where Art Thou?, an intense novel of Germany in defeat by a writer who has already been hailed as the outstanding new talent of postwar German fiction.

Herr Boll creates a panoramic vision of war. He tells of Ilona, the Jewish refugee, faced by death in the crematorium of a concentration camp; of Filskeit, the camp commander, driven to insanity; of Schmitz, the doctor, looking on helplessly as his patients die before his eyes; of Finck, the quartermaster, pressed by chance into the front lines and killed by bursting shrapnel; and, above all, of Feinhals, the foot soldier, hungry, exhausted, forlorn, whipped by his officers into futile counter-attacks, fleeing before Russian tanks and artillery, struggling pitifully for survival.