Jenny Erpenbeck

Consists essentially of five "books," each of which leads to a different death for an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp. She is spared in the next chapter with the help of someone's intervention and returns to Berlin to become a respected writer.

"The one novella and four stories in The Old Child go beyond the limits of the expected, the real. Somber, nostalgic and often mystical, these marvelous fictions provide glimpses into the minds of outcasts and eccentrics. The parable-like novella The Old Child describes a girl's mind seemingly blank: picked up off the street with no discoverable past, she is brought to a children's home where she finds she can "succeed by her silence." In another story, "Siberia," the heroine smuggled out of a Russian camp vigorously re-establishes herself in her old home. In "Hale and Hallowed," a woman pays a surprise nighttime visit to her friend with whom she shared a hospital room when their two sons were born."--Jacket.

In an unnamed Latin American country under an unblinking sun, an unnamed girl tries to find words for the things that make up her life. Father and mother. Ball. Car. But, in the world she inhabits, words do not mean what they say; they have "silent halves... dragging them down like lead weights". The real story is the one "that goes on to the right and the left and above and below the edges of the picture". (The Independent)

The tale of a grand summer house on a lake just outside the city of Berlin whose inhabitants have much to reveal about the ravages and battling ideologies of the twentieth century. A dozen characters tell their stories, from the Nazi architect who took over the property from a Jewish family, to the young woman who, post-reunification, loses her claim to the house that gave shape to her childhood memories.

In addition to previously unpublished autobiographical texts, the author gathers a wide variety of contributions and speeches on literature, art, music and politics.

The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes.