‘Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now’ Le Monde
‘The great novel of German reunification’ Le Figaro
‘A masterpiece’ Maurice Szafran
May, 1964. At a youth festival in East Berlin, an unlikely young couple fall in love. In the bright spring days, anything seems possible for them – it is only many years later, after her death, that Kaspar discovers the price his wife paid to get to him in West Berlin.
Shattered by grief, Kaspar sets off to uncover Birgit’s secrets in the East. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and to a young girl who accepts him as her grandfather. Their worlds could not be more different – but he is determined to fight for her.
From the author of the no.1 international bestseller The Reader, The Granddaughter is a gripping novel that transports us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to contemporary Australia, asking what might be found when it seems like all is lost.
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
‘The great novel of German reunification’ Le Figaro
‘A masterpiece’ Maurice Szafran
May, 1964. At a youth festival in East Berlin, an unlikely young couple fall in love. In the bright spring days, anything seems possible for them – it is only many years later, after her death, that Kaspar discovers the price his wife paid to get to him in West Berlin.
Shattered by grief, Kaspar sets off to uncover Birgit’s secrets in the East. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and to a young girl who accepts him as her grandfather. Their worlds could not be more different – but he is determined to fight for her.
From the author of the no.1 international bestseller The Reader, The Granddaughter is a gripping novel that transports us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to contemporary Australia, asking what might be found when it seems like all is lost.
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
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Reviews
Schlink, author of The Reader, serves up another tale of buried secrets in this decades spanning saga of a German bookseller confronted with his late wife's hushed-up heartache. When he learns that she was already pregnant when they met in 1960s Berlin - she from the east, he from the west - the discovery prompts a quest for the unknown child, as intimate marital drama morphs into the story of a divided nation.
Highly topical in its focus on neo-Nazis in presentday Germany and the lingering divisions between East and West 34 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . The Granddaughter asks many important questions, including one that feels very pertinent right now with the rise of far-right groups: "Was society failing to provide young people with a positive experience of community?"
A complex, poignant narrative that plays out in communist East Berlin in the 1960s and the neo-Nazi scene of the present day