Back to Back

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Description

The desperately moving story of a brother and a sister caught in the tide of the Cold War, from the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlisted author, Julia Franck. The moving story of a brother and a sister caught in the tide of the Cold War K the is a Jewish sculptor living in East Berlin. A survivor of the Nazi era, she is a fervent socialist who has been using her political connections to secure more significant commissions. Devoted entirely to success, she is a cruel and abrasive mother to her children. She barely acknowledges Ella's vulnerable loneliness and Thomas's quiet aspirations, and her hard-nosed brutality forces her children to build an imaginary world as a shelter from the coldness that surrounds them. As the Berlin Wall goes up, dreams are shattered, lives fall apart and this dark fairytale of East Germany unfolds.

Reviews

Like an expert geologist, Franck is digging deep into her family's extraordinary history creating things of beauty from its dark recesses. Diamond-hard and full of glittering prose, Back to Back is a powerful and moving book. I suspect there are more gems to come -- David Annand * Sunday Telegraph *
Intoxicating... A curious fusion of stark realism tempered with quirkily stylistic flights of fancy: the trademark of one of Germanys finest contemporary novelists -- Malcolm Forbes * Literary Review *
Franck is an outstanding talent of the Germany literary landscape * Stuttgarter Zeitung *
Portrays the rise and fall of the state's ideals via the finely observed life of an artist and her children a Jewish sculptor who survives to flourish, at a cost, in the GDR -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *
A virtuoso creator of poetically charged moods...never before has East Germany been so radically depicted as dead at birth as in the arresting, magical narrative web of Julia Franck * Literarische Welt *
Franck skilfully contrasts the romantic language of the childrens fantasies with the bitter reality of emotional neglect * Nottingham Post *
Engaging and shocking * Blackpool Gazette *
A novel that, with its hypnotic language, creates its own realm of relevance... You dive back into the real world in shock * Tages Anzeiger *
The density of tone is true to the novels vision of life as a claustrophobic nightmare -- Kapka Kassabova * Guardian *
A harrowing and often difficult read, you will not be able to put this book down * UK Press Syndication *

Author Bio

Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. Her novel The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize and sold over a million copies in Germany alone. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and US magazine Kirkus Reviews. Back to Back is her second novel to be translated into English. She lives in Berlin.