Excerpt from The Chosen Ones by Steve Sem-Sandberg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Simmeringer Hauptstrasse Adrian grew up in Simmering. But not just grew up, as he would say later in life. Apart from the time I was kept at Spiegelgrund, I've spent my whole life in Simmering. They had me adopted but even then, where would I end up but in Simmering? Why, I was jailed in Simmering. In Kaiserebersdorf prison. He laughed when he said that but the listener understood that, to Adrian, it had been something like a curse. There are places you never seem able to leave behind. When Eugen Ziegler moved to Simmering, the Social Democrats had only just set in motion the gigantic building projects which they were determined would once and for all wipe poverty off the map, as their election posters claimed. Simmeringer Hauptstrasse was still its old self, as it had been for several centuries: a heavily trafficked through-route that linked a network of workshops, shops and pubs. The family lived in a nineteenth-century building which, like most of the larger ones in the neighbourhood turned a 'respectable' front towards the street while the tenements around the inner courtyard were crawling with dubious, lower-class life forms. The house was only two storeys high, but wide, with two separate stairwells on either side of a broad gateway for wagons that wasn't broad enough, Adrian said, because the oak uprights on either side were deeply scored where loads had scraped past, on trucks as well as horse-drawn wagons. There was a pub in the building next door and the landlord preferred to unload the heavy beer barrels in the yard. Mr Streidl, who owned the shop at the front of the building, brought his stock in the same way. The flats were reached by narrow galleries along the inner frontage, one for each storey. The Dobrosch-Ziegler family lived on the first floor, at the far end of the gallery on the right. Tucked well away in a corner of the yard, where the latrines were clustered under a tall horse-chestnut tree, there was a wash house that served the entire building. Every day, regardless of weather or time of year, the women would be doing the laundry and some would bring hordes of noisy children. One of Adrian's earliest memories is of coming home on an overcast day in the winter, when a billowing cloud of sour-smelling steam fills the big room, washing hangs on the line in the gallery and over the cooker, and Emilia and Magda, their faces glistening with sweat, lift the big pans of boiling water and shout at him in loud, shrill voices to keep out of the way or he'll get scalded. Emilia and Magda (Magdalena) were his mother's younger sisters and, because neither of them had yet got herself a husband, Adrian's father had condescended to let them live with his family. The flat actually consisted of this kitchen and another, slightly larger room where one wall was covered in mould. That so many people could share this place was really beyond all comprehension. Adrian's uncle Florian, his mother's older brother, occupied a kitchen alcove. Florian had always been what was known as 'peculiar' and never got round to getting a job, despite his sister's endless nagging and despite Eugen, Adrian's father, who whenever he came home would have a go at Florian; although, Adrian said, you wouldn't catch him saying that he had come home, that was below his dignity at the time, only that he had dropped by, often bringing booze with him and being generous at first, when he would offer everyone a drink, until suddenly he lost interest and broke into a violent rage that almost always targeted Adrian's mother and her brothers and sisters, whom he abused, called parasites and vermin, and claimed that they stayed in the flat without his permission and that he had to pay for them all, though there was of course no truth in that, Adrian said, because Florian was only one of the Dobrosch brothers who lived with them, and Uncle Ferenc paid for him, always adding a little extra when he could since Ziegler himself never contributed a cent even though he kept telling them about the big business deals he had on the go. Eugen Ziegler treated Uncle Florian especially badly. Adrian clearly remembers one particular row, when his father grabbed a handful of his uncle's long, black fringe and slammed Florian's head against the wall, as if it was a wrecking ball. And did it over and over again. The regular, dull thuds sounded like the back of a wedge axe hitting the chopping block. Florian didn't try to resist or defend himself; the whites of his eyes swivelled further and further up and back into his eye sockets. This was one of the few times that Leonie, Adrian's mother, dared to speak up against Eugen. She shouted that he was to leave her Florian alone and, if he didn't, she would leave him and never come back. She might well say that, but if she walked out, what would happen to the others? They were all her dependents: her brother and her sisters and her growing number of children. Instead, she wiped the blood off the floor, hid the empties under the sink and set Uncle Florian to glue the kitchen table leg that Eugen had broken (he was good at simple, practical things, was uncle Florian; all his sense of the here and now seemed concentrated in his hands). And so Leonie pulled on her beret, buttoned up the brown cotton coat she wore in all weathers, and went to catch the 71 tram to Schwarzenbergplatz and then go on to Wieden or Josefstadt, where she spent all day cleaning for one wealthy family after another, scrubbing their floors and beating the dust from their carpets, though some of her employers might live really far away, as when she had to walk all the way to Salmannsdorf in Döbling because she didn't even have the money for the ticket. What Leonie Dobrosch earned from her skivvying was barely enough to pay the rent so she would try to bring back scraps of food, leftovers from the tables of the well-to-do that she had begged them to give her, things like day-old bread or potatoes or Knödel that could be fried up, but before cooking the family meal she had to start cleaning and tidying all over again the moment she arrived, because everything went to pieces at home when she wasn't there. She had only one day a week that she could call her own: Sunday. Once a week, she threw them all out and allowed no one back in – you'd be told off if you so much as showed your face in the door – got down on all fours next to a bucket of water, scrubbed the floors and covered them in newspaper afterwards. When the floors were done, Leonie sat down at the kitchen table, on her own or with Florian for company (he alone was allowed to stay), and just stayed sitting there, doing nothing, saying nothing. Because the children had nowhere else to be and because wherever they happened to end up they'd sooner or later be chased away, they ganged up, regardless of age, and drifted from place to place, sometimes begging for things to eat or to trade. They stole, too; mostly easy pickings like fruit and vegetables from the open boxes grocers displayed outside their shopfronts. Adrian, whose aunties rarely had time for him, had belonged to the local gang since the age of just three or four. The children ran about down by the old hospital barracks in Hasenleiten, or by the Donau canal where the banks in the summer were miracles of cool stillness under the canopies of the trees, or they might go to the field with the huge gasometers, monumental brown-brick structures which loomed over his earliest childhood. When they lived on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, he was often the youngest of the child drifters and would quite often get lost. One story that was repeated about him in the family (his sister Laura kept telling it) was about how Adrian once, when he was four, apparently fainted outside the Sankt Laurenz church. It was in the middle of winter and it took time before anyone spotted the tiny snow-covered bundle at the bottom of the church steps. The verger found him in the end. Since no one knew anything about him and there was no one to ask, the parish priest's housekeeper took pity on the child and brought him home with her, gave him a bath, a meal, and a bed to sleep in. This was the first time he had a bed to himself instead of sleeping at the bottom of his aunties' bed or sharing with Helmut or Laura. He spent three days with the kind lady and then his mother, brimming with shame and worry, came to collect him. Not that she was ashamed because he had been looked after by someone else. The other children had of course said where they had been that day, and she'd had a shrewd idea where her little boy was all along but hadn't wanted to get mixed up with the police (like most people in her position, Leonie Dobrosch dreaded anything to do with the authorities) and, besides, what had happened had happened and the boy might as well stay and sit down to a few decent meals. This was also how Adrian Ziegler himself saw it many years later: his mother had in a way already handed him over to strangers. And it had seemed easy to do because she felt that, when all was said and done, staying with the priest's housekeeper was for his own good, perhaps even a lucky break. Later on, in Spiegelgrund, he would have nightmares about that housekeeper with her hard, thin-lipped mouth and her unkind eyes with bright blue irises that seemed to suck in everything they saw but never offer anything in return. One day, she had fixed him with those blue eyes of hers and asked him if he knew who He was who was throned in Heaven and what His Son was called and then, when he had no answers, she had smiled haughtily, turned away and refused to explain. At home, they talked of neither Heaven nor Earth. They hardly ever mentioned anything that wasn't right there in front of you. Only Ferenc was given to hold forth about whatever came into his head and his siblings would often rebuke him for it. When the psychologists at Spiegelgrund asked Adrian where his mother and father came from, because they naturally had to find out what kind of blood flowed through his veins, he couldn't answer that question either. The past was the one thing no one spoke about at home because it was guaranteed to cause trouble. That his mother had been a sewing machine operator in a Vorarlberg factory for many years before she moved to Wien and got pregnant by that man Ziegler, was something he learnt while at Spiegelgrund, and then only by chance, when one of the staff decided to punish him by reading aloud from his notes; and as for who, or perhaps rather what Eugen Ziegler really was, that is, what he was in terms of biological heredity, Adrian would grasp only when, after being fostered for four years, his foster parents rejected him and sent him off to reform school in Mödling, where the staff informed him that he'd never be any good, what with his father being of Gypsy stock. But then, something happened. Perhaps it was simply that the war began. One morning, in October 1939, he was told to go to the director's office. There was a surprise for him, the director said and he opened a door that Adrian had thought just led to a cupboard and none other than his Gypsy King father popped out, like a rabbit out of a hat, beaming at his son as he declared that it was time they let bygones be bygones and started afresh. By then he was ten years old but hadn't seen his father since he was six and even before then, only a few isolated occasions many months apart. The director told Adrian that he was to go home with his father. And seemed to expect him to be happy. Actually, he had never been more scared in his life.

Excerpted from The Chosen Ones by Steve Sem-Sandberg. Copyright © 2016 by Steve Sem-Sandberg. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.