SEE THROUGH IT FEEL THE FISSURE LAUGH & RESIST

Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut

Nazi propagandist. American spy. Both true. One man.

For you if

you want the Vonnegut novel that doesn't let you laugh your way out — the one where the dark humor is the only thing standing between the argument and despair

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$18 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. was an American playwright who became a Nazi propagandist during WWII — delivering radio broadcasts that inflamed hatred across Germany — but was simultaneously, secretly, a spy for the Americans whose coded messages inside those broadcasts saved thousands of Allied lives. After the war nobody can prove he was a spy. He is tried as a war criminal. The novel's moral is stated directly by Vonnegut in his introduction: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Darker than Slaughterhouse-Five, less comfortable than Cat's Cradle — the dark humor is present but the grief is heavier, the complicity is real, and the comedy is the thing that makes the moral bearable rather than the thing that makes it land. The most morally serious Vonnegut novel and the one that most honestly confronts the question of what it means to do terrible things for good reasons.

Where This Book Lives