Back to Back

The desperately moving story of a brother and a sister caught in the tide of the Cold War, from the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlisted author, Julia Franck.

Like an expert geologist, Franck is digging deep into her family's extraordinary history creating things of beauty from its dark recesses. Diamond-hard and full of glittering prose, Back to Back is a powerful and moving book. I suspect there are more gems to come

Intoxicating... A curious fusion of stark realism tempered with quirkily stylistic flights of fancy: the trademark of one of Germany’s finest contemporary novelists

Franck is an outstanding talent of the Germany literary landscape

Portrays the rise and fall of the state's ideals via the finely observed life of an artist and her children – a Jewish sculptor who survives to flourish, at a cost, in the GDR

A virtuoso creator of poetically charged moods...never before has East Germany been so radically depicted as dead at birth as in the arresting, magical narrative web of Julia Franck

Franck skilfully contrasts the romantic language of the children’s fantasies with the bitter reality of emotional neglect

A novel that, with its hypnotic language, creates its own realm of relevance... You dive back into the real world in shock

The density of tone is true to the novel’s vision of life as a claustrophobic nightmare

A harrowing and often difficult read, you will not be able to put this book down

A haunting examination of the far-reaching consequences society can have on relationships

Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. Her novel The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize and sold over a million copies in Germany alone. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and US magazine Kirkus Reviews. Back to Back is her second novel to be translated into English. She lives in Berlin.

The moving story of a brother and a sister caught in the tide of the Cold War 
 
Käthe is a Jewish sculptor living in East Berlin. A survivor of the Nazi era, she is a fervent socialist who has been using her political connections to secure more significant commissions. Devoted entirely to success, she is a cruel and abrasive mother to her children. She barely acknowledges Ella’s vulnerable loneliness and Thomas’s quiet aspirations, and her hard-nosed brutality forces her children to build an imaginary world as a shelter from the coldness that surrounds them. 
 
As the Berlin Wall goes up, dreams are shattered, lives fall apart and this dark fairytale of East Germany unfolds.

The Blind Side of the Heart

An international bestseller, great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.

The opening of Julia Frank's novel is among the most powerful in recent years, a narrative so assured that the reader is gripped...This is a great, big silence-breaker of a novel, a laser beam into the German darkness from a writer who, one feels, has a great deal more to say

Franck's command of the language of misery and loss is awesome, but so is her gift for describing the warmth of burgeoning life when things are going right

One of the most haunting works I have ever read about 20th century Germany...The book's moral perspective is faultless, as is Franck's sensitivity to character, sexuality and the struggle to be a free woman in a fascist society...The Blind Side of the Heart is a masterpiece

It is not surprising that this book won the German Book Prize... It is a rich moving and complex novel

Elegant novel ... Franck's great strength is her ability to place her characters in unenviable situations yet retain the reader's sympathy

There is a relentless sense of purpose about the complex, ever-shifting narrative that continually tests the reader

It is an admirable book and in its best passages is inspired and haunting

Generations of women survive, most movingly, in the wreckage left by total war

Beautifully constructed... Franck has a remarkable ability to capture the nuances of human behaviour,and her subtle depiction of Helene's growing coldness, or "blindness", and the wider blindness of a society heading for disaster, is utterly compelling

With its intriguing plot and strong characterisation, Julia Franck's novel depicts beautifully both personal and historical tragedies, and gives us a compelling portrait of a remarkable woman in difficult times

Independent on Sunday, Christmas round up

Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. She studied the anthropology of Native Americans, philosophy, and German language and literature at the Free University of Berlin. The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award. She lives in Berlin.

Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. 
 
This is a tale of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman. 
 
Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010.

Julia Franck

Anthea Bell

Scientist Nelly Senff is desperate to escape her life in East Berlin. The father of her two children has supposedly committed suicide, and she wants to leave behind the prying eyes of the Stasi. 
 
But the West is not all she hoped for. Nelly and her children are held in Marienfelde, a refugee processing centre and no-man’s-land between East and West. There she meets Krystyna, a Polish woman who hopes that medical treatment in the West will save her dying brother; Hans, a troubled actor released from prison in the East; and John, a CIA man monitoring the refugees for possible Stasi spies. All lives cross here, in this gateway to a new life. 
 
Now an award-winning film

Julia Franck

West

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

More books from this author