Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut · 1922–2007 · USA

Why it matters

Howard Campbell broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin while secretly encoding Allied intelligence in its cadence, guilty of one crime and innocent of the other, and able to prove neither. Vonnegut's mordant answer to the banality of evil: we are what we pretend to be.

At a glance

A confessional first-person frame and short chapters keep a morally knotty premise readable.