KENEALLY, Thomas. Schindler's List. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1999.

Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt decorations and lettering to covers and spine. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 398 pp., illustrated with photographs. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published as Schindler's Ark, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982. Winner of the Booker Prize, 1982.

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) grew up in Sydney and, after briefly entering a Catholic seminary, published his first novel in 1964. He has since published more than thirty novels, four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize before winning it in 1982 for Schindler's Ark — the first novel by an Australian to win the award. He lives in Sydney, where his career, his advocacy, and his presence in Australian literary life have made him one of the most significant figures in the national literature. A member of the Order of Australia, he is among the most decorated writers the country has produced.

Schindler's Ark was published in London in 1982 and in the United States as Schindler's List — the title used for this Easton Press edition and, subsequently, for Steven Spielberg's film. The book originated in a coincidence: browsing a luggage shop in Beverly Hills in 1980, Keneally fell into conversation with the owner, Leopold Pfefferberg, who turned out to be one of the survivors of Oskar Schindler's enamelware and munitions factories in Kraków and Brünnlitz. Pfefferberg had been trying for decades to find a writer willing to tell the story. Keneally agreed, spent years interviewing survivors across several continents, and wrote a book that drew on their testimony while adding fictional scenes and dialogue where the documentary record was silent or incomplete — a method he described as "documentary fiction" and which generated the only sustained controversy the book has attracted.

Oskar Schindler (1908–1974) was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who used the forced labour of Jewish workers in his Kraków enamelware factory. What followed — the gradual, costly, dangerous, and apparently improbable transformation of a war profiteer into a man willing to spend his entire fortune on the protection of his workers from extermination — is the subject of Keneally's book. By the end of the war, Schindler had saved more than twelve hundred lives. The means he used were bribery, deception, the construction of false records, and an increasingly reckless personal intervention in the mechanisms of the Final Solution. The book asks, without resolving, how and why a man of Schindler's background and character arrived at the choices he made, and what those choices cost him.

Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation, starring Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, and Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth, won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and is consistently ranked among the greatest films ever made. Keneally subsequently wrote Searching for Schindler (2007), a memoir of the research that produced the original book.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000553