Maaza Mengiste

Everyone who knows me knows how much I love and admire this transcendent book. I often like to say that the main character is a house. But it is also history, and how it unfolds as one tenant after the other calls this house a home. And it is also one character who appears through out, who barely utters a word. Erpenbeck’s language: lyrical and brutal, and conceptually heady all at once, carries us from the early days of WWII through to the reunification of Germany. Translated expertly by Susan Bernofsky, this novel is mind-blowing.