façade

A young architect, his famous mentor, and his loved ones struggle as the very meaning of things—a carefully conceived building, an artist, a life—come under threat in Nazi Germany.

At the center of FAÇADE is Bauhaus architecture student Johannes Schröding. Left reeling after the Gestapo’s closure of his school, Johannes takes a safe, low-level position at a conservative Berlin architecture firm. By day he renders conformist designs into finished drawings. By night he secretly transforms these into works of openness and light.

Johannes’s mentor, former Bauhaus director and famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, discovers how little room there is in Germany for buildings designed with human beings as a starting point. More successful in winning commissions will be Johannes’s father and anti-mentor Karl, a lifelong lover of neoclassicist ideas. But Karl will soon discover how easy it is to mistake one idea for something else entirely.

Confronted with Nazi domesticity laws, Johannes’s other loved ones—Britte, a female artist grappling with single motherhood, Margarete, a Women’s League leader forced to indoctrinate German mothers, and Anneliese, a Nazi wife struggling with infertility—find themselves making difficult choices that will have lasting consequences.

All the while, war looms on the horizon. When Johannes’s secret drawings threaten to come to light, hiding behind a safe public face is more alluring than ever. But when he discovers the dark agenda behind Hitler’s architectural vision for Berlin—and his own father’s involvement in it—Johannes must decide to what lengths he’ll go, and at what cost, to assert the truth as he sees it.

Examining the insidious progress of nazification through the lens of art and architecture, FAÇADE interweaves multiple perspectives to tell a story of identity, courage, and perseverance. The novel ultimately explores how our choices make us, and how hope can persist, even in the bleakest of spaces.

FAÇADE (105,000 words) will appeal to fans of WWII fiction like All the Light We Cannot See, as well as to readers who enjoy works of biographical fiction like Loving Frank, A Piece of the World, and The Secrets We Kept.

Read the opening scene of FAÇADE.