Berlin, October 1938. Katharina Brenner is a translator at the German Foreign Ministry - invisible, precise, careful. Her job is to render official documents into English. Her job is to carry meaning from one language to another, without adding anything of her own. Then she reads the ninth line of a grain allocation report and finds a sentence that does not belong there. Seven words, hidden inside the bureaucratic language of the official document like a message in a sealed room. Someone inside the ministry has been encoding testimony - the record of events so terrible they could not be spoken aloud - inside the documents that cross her desk. The man who wrote them is dead. The woman who read them before her has disappeared. And now Katharina is the only person in the building who knows what the documents contain. She has three choices. Destroy what she has found. Report it to people who would destroy it for her. Or become what the chain needs her to become: the last translator, the final courier, the reader who carries the record out of Germany before it is too late. Set against the backdrop of Kristallnacht and the final months before war, The Last Translation is a novel about language and silence, about the cost of knowing and the cost of looking away - and about one woman's discovery that the most dangerous thing she possesses is her ability to read between the lines.
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