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A powerful exploration of identity and belonging, Where You Come From is the major new novel from internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Saša Stanišic Saša Stanišic's Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Stanišic traces a family's escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a life in Germany. As he explores what it means to be European today, he examines how it feels to learn a new language, to find new friends and new jobs, and to build an identity between countries and cultures. Translated by Damion Searls, Where You Come From is about homelands, both remembered and imagined. A book that bends form and genre with wit, heart, and exceptional craftsmanship to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives. 'Wonderfully inventive and impressive.' - Guardian
“A brilliant debut novel” about a young Bosnian War refugee who finds the secret to survival in language and stories (Los Angeles Times). For Aleksandar Krsmanović, Grandpa Slavko’s stories endow life in Višegrad with a kaleidoscopic brilliance. Neighbors, friends, and family past and present take on a mythic quality; the River Drina courses through town like the pulse of life itself. So when his grandfather dies suddenly, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. But then soldiers invade Višegrad—a town previously unconscious of racial and religious divides—and it’s no longer important that Aleksandar is the best magician in the nonaligned states; suddenly it is important to have the right last name and to convince the soldiers that Asija, the Muslim girl who turns up in his apartment building, is his sister. Alive with the magic of childhood, the surreality of war and exile, and the power of language, every page of this glittering novel thrums with the joy of storytelling. “Wildly inventive.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Poignant and hauntingly beautiful.” —The Village Voice “A funny, heartbreaking, beautifully written novel.” —The Seattle Times
It's the night before the Feast in the village of Fürstenfelde (population: declining), but not everyone is asleep. The local artist, wearing an evening dress and gumboots, goes down to the lake under cover of darkness. The village archivist is kept awake by ancient tales that threaten to take on a life of their own. A retired lieutenant-colonel weighs his pistol, and his future, in his hand. And eighteen-year-old Anna, namesake of the Feast, prepares to take her place in tomorrow's drinking and dancing, eating and burning.On this night of misdeeds and mischief, they are joined by a dead ferryman, a hapless bellringer, a cigarette machine, two robbers in football shirts and a vixen on the hunt - as their fates collide in the most unexpected ways.
Examines the heightened role of politics in contemporary German and Austrian cultural productions and institutions and what it means for German Studies.
The Senegalese author’s prize-winning novel explores brutality and resistance in a fictional North African city gripped by a fundamentalist regime. Under the regime of the so-called Brotherhood, two young people are publicly executed for having loved each other. In response, their mothers begin a secret correspondence, their only outlet for the grief they share. Spurred by The Brotherhood’s escalating brutality, a band of intellectuals seeks to foment rebellion by publishing an underground newspaper. Menawhile, the regime’s leader undertakes a personal crusade to find the responsible parties, and bring them to his own sense of justice. In Brotherhood, Mbougar Sarr explores how resistance and heroism can often give way to cowardice, all while giving voice to the personal struggles of each of his characters as they try to salvage the values they hold most dear. Winner of the French Voices Grand Prize, Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and Grand Prix du Roman Métis
'One of the greatest football novels ever written and a comic masterpiece' DJ Taylor 'But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want it to believe it.' J.L. Carr In their new all-buttercup-yellow-stripe, Steeple Sinderby Wanderers, who usually feel lucky when their pitch is above water-level, are England's most obscure team. This uncategorizable, surreal and extremely funny novel is the story of how they start the season by ravaging the Fenland League and end it by going all the way to Wembley. Told through unreliable recollection, florid local newspaper coverage and bizarre committee minutes, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is both entertaining and moving. There will never be players again like Alex Slingsby, Sid 'the Shooting Star' Swift and the immortal milkman-turned-goalkeeper, Monkey Tonks.
A prescient political and psychological thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines, by one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary novelists A few short years from now, the world is an even more uncertain place than it is today, and politics everywhere is marching rightward: Trump is gone, but Brexit is complete, as is Frexit. There's a global financial crisis, armed conflict, and mass migration, and an ultrapopulist movement governs in Germany. With their democracy facing the wrecking ball, most well-off Germans turn inward, focusing on their own lives. Britta, a wife, mother, and successful businesswoman, ignores the daily news and concentrates on her family and her work running a clinic ...
Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike.
"A masterpiece."-- The Guardian "Superb."-- The New York Times Review of Books Older brother is a driver for an app-based car service. Closed off for eleven hours every day in his cab, constantly tuned in to the radio, he ruminates about his life and the world that is waiting just on the other side of the windshield. Younger brother set out for Syria several months ago, full of idealism. Hired as a nurse by a Muslim humanitarian organization, he has recently stopped sending any news back home. This silence eats away at his father and brother, who ask themselves over and over again: why did he leave? One evening, the intercom rings. Little brother has come home. In this incisive first novel, Mahir Guven alternates between lively humour and the gravity imposed by the threat of terrorism. He explores a world of Uberized workers, weighed down by loneliness, struggling to survive, but he also describes the universe of those who are actors in the global jihad: indoctrination, combat, their impossible return . . . This is the poignant story of a Franco-Syrian family whose father and two sons try to integrate themselves into a society that doesn't offer them many opportunities.