The first novel by the remarkable German writer, Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, written by him immediately after the war (1946–1947). The hero of the book is a young man from an ordinary German family, drafted to the front. Love for a woman and hatred of Nazism, the joys of gain and the bitterness of loss - everything that Böll later wrote with such force in his works is fully present in this novel, published in Germany only half a century after the end of World War II. In Russian language is published for the first time.