The second of Jiri Weil's novels to be published by Daunt Books, Life With A Star can be read almost as a companion novel to Mendelssohn is on the Roof, a biting satire of the bureaucratic machinery of tyranny. In Life With A Star we are exposed to the mind-numbing tedium of terror. Josef Roubicek, a former bank clerk, struggles against the daily impossibilities of life under a regime which has rendered him unemployed and undesirable. Like the resistance mounted in Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, the steps taken to undermine the stranglehold of the system are tiny but not insignificant, and heroism is distilled to the capacity to hope when all hope is lost. This is a quiet, haunting novel, with the power to transfix and astonish.