很多英国人都认为，威尔森的这部小说被故意排斥在了布克图书奖的侯选名单之外。很难说其中的原因是什么，因为读者和评论界事实上好象都很津津乐道于阿道夫·希特勒和威妮弗蕾德·瓦格纳之间的特殊关系。

该书以瓦格纳家族秘书的视角，讲述了发生在１９２５～１９４０年间，威妮弗蕾德·瓦格纳和阿道夫·希特勒的不同寻常的故事。威妮弗蕾德是一名在孤儿院长大的英国女孩，１８岁时嫁给了德国最有争议性的天才人物——德国歌剧家、作曲家瓦格纳的儿子，威妮弗蕾德是一个狂热的亲德派、一个瓦格纳的崇拜者、一个日耳曼民族主义者。１９２５年，威妮弗蕾德和希特勒相识，二人一见如故，很快建立了密切交往。

(http://www.wowa.cn/T_view_inf.asp?view_id=43627)

Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the years 1925–40, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth.

Winifred, an English girl, brought up in an orphanage in East Grinstead, married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany’s most controversial genius, is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian dreamer, a Teutonic patriot.

In the debacle of the post-Versailles world, the Wagner family hope for the coming, not of a warrior, a fearless Siegfried, but of a Parsifal, a mystic idealist, a redeemer-figure. In 1925, they meet their Parsifal – a wild-eyed Viennese opera-fanatic in a trilby hat, a mac and a badly fitting suit. Hitler has already made a name for himself in some sections of German society through rabble-rousing and street corner speeches. It is Winifred, though, who believes she can really see his poetry. Almost at once they drop formalities and call one another ‘Du’ rather than ‘Sie’. She is Winnie and he is Wolf.

Like Winnie, Hitler was an outsider. Like her, he was haunted by the impossibility of reconciling the pursuit of love and the pursuit of power; the ultimate inevitability, if you pursued power, of destruction. Both had known the humiliations of poverty. Both felt angry and excluded by society. Both found each other in an unusual kinship that expressed itself through a love of opera.

In A.N. Wilson’s most bold and ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany is brilliantly recreated, and forms the backdrop to this incredible bond, which ultimately reveals the remarkable capacity of human beings to deceive themselves.

(http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=0091796768)

A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his fiction. He lives in North London.

(http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/author.htm?authorID=2516)