Let me start off by saying I'm a sucker for any WWII fictional story, and this one is a good one. Good, not great. The three main characters are unlikeable, but the author weaves them into a story that keeps you interested to see where their actions take them.
You are first introduced to Adam, and within the first few pages you discover that he is a rich asshole who thinks he can do whatever he pleases. This turns around for him, and throughout the book he keeps making mistake after mistake to save his, his company's and his grandfather's reputation. The author tries to weave in a rough background with neglectful parents but you do not feel sorry for him. He is an asshole.
His wife Tess is an equally dislikeable character. She has no backbone. She discovers all the mistakes Adam makes and does nothing. You are waiting the entire book for her to lose it because he's an asshole. She lets Adam walk all over her and cannot commit to ideas and plans. Again the author tries to weave in a woe is me background with a failed career attempt, but yet again you don't care.
Arkady is the only character with a little substance. A WWII survivor, he is the only character with a backbone. His part of the story mainly focuses on his time in a concentration camp, and you feel for his character. There is a good plot twisy to his character towards the end of the story, which was a little predictable, but no commonly used in other WWII stories I come across.
The story is filled with too many incomplete storylines. While there is a lot of action, there seem to be no consequences as the author moves on to the next action to cover up the previous one. I was left feeling slightly unsatisfied with how the story ended, but also entertained with the hero story surrounds Arkady, which is what this story needed to make it good

A breezy read, somewhat undermined by a hackneyed conclusion and loathsome central character. It was okay.

You can tell that The Toymaker is literature because it's littered with unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things. Pieper has fashioned an opening chapter designed to weed out the squeamish, replete with underage sex and praise of the teenaged female form. We have to wait before we get to the spoiled lothario's wife, who is slightly better, and then to the Holocaust flashbacks of his Grandfather.

The Toymaker is an easy read that becomes incredibly neat and Teflon like in the final analysis. It's designed to feel like it's challenging without really challenging, and it's not hard to see why it could be the next big thing. If there are people like this in Australian society, better to live in the sea - and I say this as someone who has read multiple Christos Tsiolkas books and not felt quite the same way.

tbh, I didn't care for the current day timeline. Adam is a pretty shit character.
But the Arkady past story during WWII hooked me every time it came around and the twist by the end had me shook.

Had to force myself to finish this book. really could not get into it. I only gave it two stars because the author did a good job at making me feel absolute hatred for a character!

The opening of Liam Pieper’s The Toymaker is fairly confronting. Adam Kulakov, a successful middle aged man is thinking of ending his affair (not his first) with a sixteen-year-old school girl. This is just the start of Adam’s problems, problems that are juxtaposed against the struggles of his wife Tess to keep their family business afloat and the traumatic history of his grandfather, transported to Auschwitz during World War 2.

The Toymaker has some finely observed, if not always particularly likeable, characters. Adam Kulakov is the epitome of the privileged Australian male. Second generation, living high on the money generated by a company started and grown by his grandfather, arrogant and entitled. Adam’s problems, which become his family’s problems, are grounded in his own hubris and stupidity, in his belief that he is somehow better than those around him. His wife Tess has come from a different direction – her family fortune squandered, and finding herself in a loveless marriage she finds meaning in the company and her connection with Adam’s grandfather. All this is held against the struggle of Arkady Kulakov, a young man transported to Auschwitz and blackmailed into working on medical experiments, finding some meaning by bringing comfort to children slated for death by making them toys.

The Toymaker is a novel about secrets. The three main characters all keep secrets about themselves, to varying degrees of success from each other. As Adam’s world unravels, it is these secrets and their revelations, to the reader if not other characters, that drive the plot forward. Pieper handles this aspect expertly, carefully dropping hints along the way so that major revelations and twists come as a shock but not, on reflection, a surprise.

Pieper tackles some big issues in the The Toymaker. From the experimentation on children in Auschwitz to the exploitation of women and children to fuel modern capitalism. From exploring how people justified what they do during war in order to survive through to the entitlement culture of modern Australia and justifications of a completely different sort. The Toymaker is a confronting, original and engaging – a deep, often disturbing look at the dark heart of the modern world.

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Memorable Quotes

"It wasn't her first pregnancy. In Berlin a couple of years before she'd managed to pick one up, like a nasty infection..."

"This was an empire that had carved itself out of snow and sadness, a nation of people where each had been given both a life not worth living and an iron will to survive."

"Jan's effeminate side is something he slips in and out of like an outfit, of which he has a closetful."

"Of course, nothing cures a bad case of arts degree faster than a decade of struggle, something she discovered as her youth, and her trust fund, waned."

"They say there are no atheists at the end of a gun."