From the 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize, a collection of short essays on the places, people, rituals and objects that slip into the realm of memory.

In this fascinating collection, Jenny Erpenbeck meditates on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Whether recalling the demolition of familiar places, the loss of a friendship, or a change in social attitudes, Erpenbeck's sharp intelligence, eye for telling detail, and her nuanced perspective on her country's history and her own writing lifeimbue these short pieces with lasting power.

Details

ISBN13: 9781803512990
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 128
Edition:
Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.8(H)x12.9(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017). as well as Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections (2020). In 2024, her novel Kairos was awarded the International Booker Prize. Her work is translated into over thirty languages.

Kurt Beals is a translator and professor at the University of Richmond.

Reviews

Compact yet kaleidoscopic * Guardian *
Jenny Erpenbeck is an expert chronicler of this post-Wall era, from the highs and hopes of the 1990 to a pervasive Angst mode today... Erpenbeck applies her finely calibrated divining rod to chart that story down the decades * Financial Times *
I enjoyed Erpenbeck's quirky reflections... Melancholy wisdom * Independent *
In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate -- Mary Costello
Meditative, moving and profoundly beautiful -- Edmund de Waal
Beautifully minimalist * Gloss *
Few writers could find such feeling in a book about nothingness * Observer *
The most accessible and evocative chronicler of post-Wall Germany... Erpenbeck's experience of impermanence captures the anxious undertow and reluctant trade-offs of urban modernity * New Statesman *
Here is a writer who has seen things fall apart, only to live through further false promises... Beals's translation is elegant and well-judged * Irish Times *
Sane, witty and wise. A nice bite-sized introduction to this important European writer