Winner of the HWA Sharpe Gold Crown for Best Historical Novel. An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel of a friendship tragically interrupted by war, by German author Ralf Rothmann. Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany.By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over.When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close.Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front.When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances. In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy. 'To Die in Spring holds its own against Günter Grass and Erich Maria Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership' – Guardian