THE SECRET LIVES OF BROTHER KELLER

THE SECRET LIVES OF BROTHER KELLER focuses on the poignant and tortured relationship between two monks, Benedict Stolz and his childhood friend Hermann Keller, a double agent inside the SS. The story is also about the drama of increasingly desperate but ultimately futile efforts to eliminate Hitler and the irony of how, in the end, two estranged monks changed history.

Several years ago, Anthony David discovered an evocative collection of large-format glass plate negatives taken in the Holy Land in the 1920s and '30s by Dr. Benedict Stolz, a German Benedictine monk. The discovery of these old photographs was the impetus for THE SECRET LIVES OF BROTHER KELLER, a true, and amazing story about the political intrigues and upheavals in Europe and in Palestine before and during the Second World War, and the spiritual crisis spawned by the encounter between the Vatican and the Third Reich.

This extraordinary book is the result of relentless investigation, scrupulous scholarship and powerful prose. Anthony David bases his writing on interviews, letters, diaries, secondary literature and exhaustive archival research.

Part of what sets the book apart from standard non-fiction works on the World War II era, the Nazis and the Holocaust is its primary source: Father Albino Gorla, a hundred year-old Italian priest in the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem. Gorla's compelling narrative gives eyewitness depth, emotional immediacy, nuance and complexity to the saga, as it actually unfolded in real time.

The result is creative non-fiction reminiscent of - and equal to - Edmund de Waal's THE HARE WITH THE AMBER EYES and Erik Larson's IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS.

ANTHONY DAVID has written nine books. He was the co-writer for ONCE UPON A COUNTRY (FSG), the memoirs of the Palestine philosopher Sari Nusseibeh which shared the prestigious Siegfried Unseld literary prize with Amos Oz. His first biography was The Patron, the story of the entrepreneur and publisher, Salman Schocken (Metropolitan Books 2004). He has translated, edited, and introduced two volumes on the German-Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem (Harvard University Press 2002 and Harvard/Belknap 2007).