STROLL into any high street book shop right now and it won’t be long before you spot a copy of Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada.

Cast your mind back to the end of 2006, when Vintage published the paperback edition of Irene Nemirovksy’s Suite Francaise.

Readers couldn’t get enough of the author’s tales of wartime France and now the same publishing phenomenon is happening with a German novel first published in 1947.

Alone in Berlin is a rediscovered masterpiece which has really taken off, after being translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published by Penguin.

The story is set in Berlin in 1940, and readers should prepare themselves for a dark and disturbing journey.

Alone in Berlin focuses on Otto and Anna Quangel, an ordinary working couple, who at first are not completely hostile to the rise of the National Socialists.

But their attitude changes in 1940, when their beloved son, Ottochen, is killed while fighting in France.

Otto, a foreman in a factory that makes furniture, realises he will soon be making coffins, and decides to start resisting the Nazi regime.

Risking his life, he begins to write anonymous postcards against the Nazis, and drops them in the stairwells of city buildings.

Soon the postcard campaign comes to the attention of Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a murderous game of cat-and-mouse begins.

It is understood that Fallada’s novel follows the Gestapo files on the illegal activities of an actual Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel.

Following the death of their son in 1940, they began to deposit 200 postcards and leaflets in stairwells around their home district.

They were betrayed and arrested in 1942, sentenced to death and executed the following April.

Sometimes I struggle with novels that have been translated into English, simply because I don’t enjoy the phrasing of a particular translator.

But on this occasion, Hofmann keeps the prose plain and simple as the tragedy unfolds.

After a slow start, Alone in Berlin took hold of me. The novel is accompanied by a useful afterword by Geoff Wilkes, of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, and a crucial final offering entitled The True Story Behind Alone in Berlin.