Literature
Billiards at Half-past Nine (1965)
9/6/1958 · Heinrich Böll
The entirety of Heinrich Böll's novel unfolds on September 6, 1958 — the eightieth birthday of patriarch Heinrich Fähmel — told through shifting first-person voices across three generations of a German family of architects. The grandfather built the Abbey of St. Anton; his son demolished it in wartime resistance; his grandson is now rebuilding it, and the grandmother is released from a sanatorium that same day to attend the birthday dinner.