RaveThe Jewish ChronicleExtraordinary ... de Bastion, herself an accomplished singer-songwriter, has Stephen de Bastion’s voice, recorded on numerous cassette tapes, gravelly, rumbling, and occasionally playing his original music. So powerful is this voice that she sometimes finds herself having conversations with her unseen grandfather, as though he were in the room. And her skill is allowing the reader to have such conversations, too.
Norman Lebrecht
RaveThe Jewish ChronicleGlorious ... A deep dive into the politics and cafe society of Beethoven’s day, and his effect on contemporary composers.
Jack Fairweather
RaveThe Jewish ChronicleThis is a Holocaust-era work like few others ... In some hands, The Volunteer could have been a soapy, fictionalized memoir with \'Hollywood film script\' written all over it. But Fairweather, a British war reporter who has worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, was determined not to put a word on paper which could not be checked out or substantiated. The book comes with a forest’s worth of footnotes, and every minute detail of what took place in Auschwitz is accounted for ... It’s taken years, but with The Volunteer, Jack Fairweather has finally set the record straight.
