'Brilliant sketches of a society in decay' George Orwell Christopher Isherwood is the narrator of Goodbye to Berlin. His story obliquely evokes the gathering storm during the rise to power of the Nazis, as seen through the eyes of a series of individuals: his landlady Fräulein Schroeder; Sally Bowles, the English upper-class waif; the Nowaks, a struggling working-class family; and the Landauers, a wealthy, civilised family of Jewish store owners, whose lives are about to be ruined. Wry, detached, impressionistic in approach, yet vividly eloquent about the brutal effect of public events on private lives, Goodbye to Berlin has long been recognised as one of the most powerful and popular novels of