I, YOU, WE, THEM is a major and radical work about personal responsibility, genocide, life and grief, sympathy and empathy, art and memory in the vein of Gitta Sereny and W G Sebald. It is part memoir interwoven with history, biography, investigative journalism, nature and travel writing, and looks afresh at the holocaust, analysing it for a new generation and making it shockingly pertinent in relation to current international business practices.
The book has been fifteen years in the writing. It is meticulously researched and has been supported by a major grant from the Lannan Foundation and others from The Arts Council England, the Network for Social Change, the Amiel-Milburn Trust and the Authors Foundation. Gretton’s intellectually and ethically rigorous approach over most of his adult life to this project, the absorbtion he has brought to it – this is the jouney we are drawn into and want to share as a reader.
John Berger has this to say about it:
‘The book is going to be extraordinary – both in its originality and in the impact it is likely to have – an international resonance….. It is an intimate meditation about memory, alternatives, poetic flashes and evil. It has a voice we’ve already heard somewhere inside our own heads, and which in our loneliness, we’ve tended to dismiss. In this extraordinary book the same voice addresses us, and so we’re not alone. An exchange develops and a journey begins together.’