David Shirreff, an ex-journalist at the Economist has written some remarkable books and I am helping him prepare three of them for publication.

“Gundermann” is the first English language biography of Gerhard Gundermann, sometime known as the ‘German Bob Dylan’. Gundermann drove the largest machine in the world by day, scooping out lignite (or brown coal) and leaving a scar across the East German landscape several kilometres wide. By night he sang songs that encapsulated the complex political, moral and emotional landscape of life under communist rule.

David’s remarkable book is about more than just the life of this, in many ways flawed, man who, like many East Germans (or ‘Ossis’), found himself reporting on his closest friends to the Stasi.

“Gundermann” is a book to read if you want to understand what it was like to be an East German during the cold war. David Shirreff’s meticulously researched and highly original biography possesses a dark poetic quality and is the first part in a trilogy of books about the devastating impact of the East German coal industry and the desperate fight to save the doomed villages that stood in its path.