Julia Franck Rücken an Rücken Novel, 320 pages
Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. She studied German literature, Philosophy and Anthropology of Native Americans at the FU Berlin. She has received several awards, including the Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize in 2004 and the Roswitha Medal of the City of Gandersheim in 2005. She spent the year 2005 in the Villa Massimo in Rome. Her most recent publications are Liebediener (1999), Bauchlandung. Geschichten zum Anfassen (2000) and Lagerfeuer (2003). For her novel Die Mittagsfrau (2007) Julia Franck received the German Book Award 2007.
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East Berlin in the late 1950s. Brother and sister Thomas and Ella grow up lost in the house of the sculptress Käthe. A Jewish communist, this passionate but gruff woman only survived the Nazis through fortuitous circumstances. After the war she placed all her hopes in socialist Germany. But her ardent commitment to society takes its toll: estrangement from the individual, coldness towards her nearest and dearest. She has as little acknowledgement for Ella’s vulnerable loneliness as for Thomas' melancholy longing. When the Berlin Wall is built in 1961 and Thomas escapes into an unhappy love for Marie, nobody can stave off a tragedy.
Julia Franck writes about a great love without reservations and a utopia with a tragic ending, a story that grows into a social novel.
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