Press

What the critics say

An exquisitely constructed narrative... Peeling the Onion is a genuine masterpiece
- Independent on Sunday

A memoir of rare literary beauty
- New Yorker

As a writer, his influence still looms large, and Peeling the Onion is a reminder why. It has that same imaginative accuracy that made The Tin Drum a bestseller
- The Times

An ingenious but treacherous text that glides constantly between past and present, first and third person, memory and imagination
- Evening Standard

This subtle and expertly written book is really a memoir about forgetting
- Sunday Times

Grass's profound and moving memoir [has] an unforgettable power, and it is not just the significance of his experiences, but the virtuosity of his writing which elevates Peeling the Onion over any memoir published in recent years
- Daily Telegraph

As a demonstration of a literary will, the novelist's last testament, it is in many ways a masterpiece
- Observer

A compelling memoir. The emotions unleashed are raw... It is with extreme eloquence that he can finally excavate the silences at the heart of his life
- New Statesman

He peels his particular onion with the candour and irony that have shaped his fabulist fiction for close on 50 years and this beautifully gruff, no-nonsense account of his early life is direct and conversational, though not without jolts of profoundly human remorse
- Irish Times

A wonderful book, full of life, full of love, vibrant and uncompromising and as picaresque and varied as all his finest works... As a portrait of a young boy and young man alive in Germany through its most devastating decades, it will stand as a factual masterpiece... an astonishing tour de force
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Much of this memoir is painfully honest, and the confessions in it are clearly written from the heart
- Mail on Sunday Book of the Week