As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestinely as a forger of identity cards. His was a hazardous occupation that eventually forced him to escape by bicycle and head toward Switzerland and safety. The writing itself (in an English translation by Alan Bance from the original German) is rough, but that simply adds to the feeling that we’re reading an authentic account of daring and survival. Members of Schönhaus’s immediate family were not so fortunate: his grandmother, both of his parents and an aunt and uncle were all transported to concentration camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942, and did not survive.