"Here is a gloriously precise and delicate novel that magically conjures a vanished world"

“Moving and engrossing; Iris Wolff makes you nostalgic for a place you don’t even know”

“Iris Wolff tells the moving story of a family from the Banat so closely connected that even across borders these ties remain. Four generations tell of losses and new beginnings in a captivating style … BLURRED explores the lives of seven people, a family of choice who despite the blows of fate and the distances between them refuse to be separated. Against the background of the collapse of the Eastern Block and the eventful history of the 20th century, a great novel is born - about friendship and what we are prepared to give up to secure another person’s happiness. With artistry and great precision, Iris Wolff explores the possibilities and the limitations of language and memory - and of the images others create in their own minds about who we really are.”

“A beautiful breath of a book. Poetry in prose, a timeless, borderless story with wings that carry you into the heart of another world - Romania's Banat, a mixing pot of magic and pain”

“Spellbinding, a richly rendered tale of family upheaval amid political crisis. A fine gem of a novel”

“Iris Wolff is a great storyteller … This author uses language that is sensual and alive, while also understanding how to depict character both vividly and subtly”

“Iris Wolff tells her story from a place of deep calm. She widens time. She gives us one century and several human lives in less than two hundred pages. Yet everything is there.”

“Iris Wolff spent the first eight years of her life in these regions before her family emigrated to Germany in 1985; these unforgettable impressions of country and small-town life, a life seemingly out of time, are the source material for her novels; and for moments time itself is repeatedly brought to a standstill in episodes of the highest literary intensity.”

“An eminently poetic novel, employing the entire range of sensory and intellectual experiences and permeated by a political and historical reality. When you also take into account the extremely original narrative style, you can barely believe how easy this short novel is to read, or how entirely it succeeds.”

“Ultimately everything comes together to make a completely wonderful book, a magnficent and notably idiosyncratic novel, its sharply drawn characters arrayed on the horizon of twentieth century European history, on history bedded in the nostalgically beautiful landscape of the Banat”

“No one else has made history float as beautifully as this”

“A stroke of luck for German language literature”

“Iris Wolff travels along the edges of political systems and transcends them … The author tells her story in a touching and a stirring manner; because the real background is often blurred, her characters and their experiences are tremendously vivid … How good that it has been nominated for the German Book Prize.”

“The great quality she possesses is perhaps what Peter Handke (referring to Hermann Lenz) once called poetic history lessons. She has found a language … that permits figures to appear, letting us see them through what they must endure. Iris Wolff has written another great novel.”

“Perhaps the great art of the storyteller Iris Wolff – who like that magician from Transylvania ended up in Stuttgart at a young age – is that through language alone, she transports us into a realm that lies beyond words. There is no escaping this magic.”

“Iris Wolff has at her disposal an incredibly sophisticated psychological tool – an instrument she uses to draw her figures. It feels like watercolour, but afterwards you really feel wow – what a huge landscape has been drawn here.”

“Quietly, unobtrusively and vividly told, each individual in this ensemble of characters is portrayed by Wolff with compassion yet in so few words. A novel that continues to resonate”

“A novel that is very diverse, poetic, political, psychologically astute and joyful”