Regarding reviewed books, the first month of 2017 was extremely varied as prove my archives. Between the covers of two contemporary and two classical novels, I found people trying to understand their surroundings. There was the Austrian woman in Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap who reconstructed her late parents’ lives before, during and after World War II to fathom their true characters. A young Spanish restorer of paintings discovered a century-old chess riddle in The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and found herself drawn into a murderous search of the truth. The Japanese boy in The River With No Bridge by Sumii Sué learnt in the years before World War I that his family origins alone sufficed to make others hate and discriminate him. And finally, a German architect looked back on his own, his family’s and his country’s past in Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll.