Overview

A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed... Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family. After Resi's latest book openly criticizes stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatization and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her. Written with dark humor and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling's prize-winning novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.

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9781950354627

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Reviews

Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin...This biting class critique is hard to turn away from. --Publishers Weekly Stelling is brilliant on the quantum universe of parenting, the sheer unpredictability of it...The novel moves effortlessly between time periods in recent German history and builds up the composite picture of a generation that has too often seen many of its ideals disappear into trust funds...compelling. --Michael Cronin, The Irish Times

"""Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin... This biting class critique is hard to turn away from."" --Publishers Weekly ""Stelling is brilliant on the quantum universe of parenting, the sheer unpredictability of it... The novel moves effortlessly between time periods in recent German history and builds up the composite picture of a generation that has too often seen many of its ideals disappear into trust funds... compelling."" --Michael Cronin, The Irish Times ""German author Anke Stelling makes her English language debut with a swingeing screed against the privilege and hypocrisy of those who sell their souls to get ahead... A merciless tirade of a novel about class, so energized by rage and wit it's impossible to tear your eyes from the page."" --Cameron Woodhead, The Age ""Stelling is down-to-earth and quick with her criticism of the liberal elite... There is a deep satisfaction in watching [main character] Resi defy expectation and norm, frustrating those who wish she would just be thankful."" --Connor Harrison, Necessary Fiction ""[A]n apologia pro vita mea... this sad, angry, and occasionally funny book works as a portrait of modern Germany and its social mores."" --Bethane Patrick, LitHub"

Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin... This biting class critique is hard to turn away from. --Publishers Weekly Stelling is brilliant on the quantum universe of parenting, the sheer unpredictability of it... The novel moves effortlessly between time periods in recent German history and builds up the composite picture of a generation that has too often seen many of its ideals disappear into trust funds... compelling. --Michael Cronin, The Irish Times German author Anke Stelling makes her English language debut with a swingeing screed against the privilege and hypocrisy of those who sell their souls to get ahead... A merciless tirade of a novel about class, so energized by rage and wit it's impossible to tear your eyes from the page. --Cameron Woodhead, The Age Stelling is down-to-earth and quick with her criticism of the liberal elite... There is a deep satisfaction in watching [main character] Resi defy expectation and norm, frustrating those who wish she would just be thankful. --Connor Harrison, Necessary Fiction [A]n apologia pro vita mea... this sad, angry, and occasionally funny book works as a portrait of modern Germany and its social mores. --Bethane Patrick, LitHub

Author Information

Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin. Lucy Jones studied German at UEA with W.G. Sebald, and worked as a freelance photographer before becoming a translator. She has lived in Berlin since 1998, where she heads Transfiction, a translators' collective, and runs the Fiction Canteen reading series. She translates literary fiction, art texts, plays, and journalism from German. Her latest translations include Blueprint, by Theresia Enzensberger, I Have No Regrets: diaries 1955--1963, by Brigitte Reimann, and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, by Silke Scheuermann. She has published her own writing in SAND, Visual Verse, Pigeon Papers NY, and 3AM Magazine.

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