A remarkably candid and discomfiting interview with the Nobel Prize laureate, reflecting on a literary life defined by the brutality of Ceaucescu's regime.

From her childhood in Romania, in a village 'as small as a thimble on the edge of the world', through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory and trauma, and on what it was to live and write during Ceausescu's regime: on the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; on the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century - and how they remain with us in the twenty-first.

Details

ISBN13: 9781783788170
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 256
Edition:
Publication Date: 04 Aug 2026
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.6(H)x13.8(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Banat, Romania. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel and The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, among other works. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.

Kate McNaughton is a documentary film maker, author and translator, working from the French, German and Italian. Her debut novel, How I Lose You, was published in 2018.

Reviews

Superb... Müller articulates well the pain and anxiety she suffered as an enemy of the state. It's heartening to learn how she regained her strength and found ways, however small, to stand up to the Securitate -- (Five stars) * Telegraph *
The Village on the Edge of the World is a rare document that shows just how much darkness can go into prose as luminous as that of Müller * TLS *
A profound delight. In this seemingly casual tour inside the mind of one of the century's great writers there are frequent, electrifying moments of immense insight - each one feels like a trapdoor opening into a reality you realise you were, till now, just skimming the surface of. Müller's thinking is glorious to share in, and her thoughts have never been more relevant -- Anna Funder
A vivid reflection on life and literature * FT *
Müller is an unnervingly acute observer and the account here of the nightmarish texture of persecution is equal in its intensity to any in fiction... The Village on the Edge of the World is an autobiographical work of rare and unsettling honesty, an extraordinary and uncompromising telling of an extraordinary and uncompromising life * Literary Review *
Certain to be brilliant * New Statesman *
A clinical and piercing reflection on life under tyranny, on the compromises that so many have to make, on choices and consequences... Heart-stopping * Financial Times *
Beautifully written and sincerely inspiring * Telegraph *
A powerful indictment of life under dictatorship, chronicles the lies, surveillance and intimate betrayals of a totalitarian bureaucracy that killed its own citizens in the name of a misguided revolutionary nationalism * Observer *