Angels Over Lusatia, a climate-change novel

A monstrous machine marches onward, devouring woods and fields, churches and homesteads, leaving a scar several kilometres wide and reducing a rural idyll to toxic desert.

When a 14th Century village faces obliteration, a lone Englishman appears, promising salvation.

Angels Over Lusatia tells the remarkable story of Michael Gromm, who joined the people of Horno in a decade-long struggle to save their homes and surrounding countryside. It meant not just fighting the mining company, local politicians, the Federal Chancellor of Germany and even the Swedish state – but changing the mindset of the people whose way of life was threatened.

In the second part of Angels over Lusatia, Gromm’s son continues his father’s campaign to stop a vile industry whose activities, even today, make a mockery of Germany’s green credentials.

As the world finally gets to grips with climate change, Angels Over Lusatia celebrates a latter-day samurai who risked everything to save a forgotten part of the planet.

David Shirreff was born in Germany and more recently worked there as a journalist for The Economist. He has written several plays, musicals and novels, including Gundermann, East Germany’s Coal-Miner Rock-Poet, a biography which shares some of the themes and geography of this book.