Bram Presser’s grandparents never spoke of their Holocaust experience, but a few years after they died an article was published claiming that his grandfather had been selected by the Nazis as the literary curator of Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Presser realized he didn’t really know anything about the person he loved the most, thus he set out on an obsessive eight-year quest to uncover the Holocaust stories his grandparents could never tell.

Part memoir, part investigation, part novel - The Book of Dirt is a wholly original approach to telling a story about survival, love, legacy, family secrets, the human condition, and “the great Perspex wall of Holocaust ownership.” “This is a book of memories, some my own, some acquired and some, I suppose, imagined,” Presser writes, but the pages that follow are unapologetically irreverent, sharp, visceral, and rich with lyrically beautiful prose that confronts history, memory, and silence.

The Book of Dirt is Presser’s attempt to make sense of the stories his family built around two remarkable survivors, set against a reimagining of those extraordinary experiences from the scraps, rumors, and whispers he found along the way, resulting in a novel that is never clearly fact, fiction or fable. And it is a heart-warming story about a grandson’s devotion to the power of storytelling and his family’s legacy.