Mother Night

Howard W. Campbell Jr. is an American playwright who grew up in Germany and, before the Second World War, is recruited by a US intelligence officer to pose as a Nazi sympathiser. He becomes one of the Reich's best-known radio propagandists while passing coded messages to the Allies in his broadcasts, and no one but his handler knows which of his two lives is the lie.

The novel is Campbell's own memoir, written in an Israeli prison cell while he waits to stand trial for war crimes. It follows his years in wartime Germany with his wife Helga, his anonymous postwar life in a New York attic, and the strange collection of neo-Nazis, spies and lonely neighbours who find him there.

Vonnegut tells it in a dry, darkly comic voice and states the moral outright in his introduction: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. First published in 1961 as a Gold Medal paperback, it was adapted as a 1996 film starring Nick Nolte.