Worlds Apart
Born in East Berlin, Julia is eight when her actress mother uproots her family of four girls, by different fathers, heading West in search of a better life. Their eventual landing in the remote countryside of Schleswig-Holstein solves no problems for this fractured household.
Desperate to escape a childhood of rural poverty, neglect and shame, the lonely child becomes addicted to writing. Aged 13, she leaves her family. At school in West Berlin, she finally encounters love. In this gripping novel based on her youthful diaries and early life, Julia Franck shows why and how a great writer found her voice.
Julia Franck’s powerful novels of family and motherhood delve deep into the nation’s tumultuous past. Her work has won numerous prizes; her novel Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize 2007, was translated into over 40 languages, filmed and has sold over a million copies in Germany alone. She lives in Berlin.
This ‘astonishing chronicle of recent German history’ (Julia Pascal), ’seamlessly translated’ by Imogen Taylor, is out on February 5 in paperback and as an eBook. Pre-order here:
REVIEWS
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— Julia Pascal, London Grip
"This memoir is an astonishing chronicle of recent German history seen through the eyes of a girl born in the East and brought up in the West. This is a landscape where Nazi, post-Nazi, Communist and post-Communist worlds elide.
”The most striking parts of the story are when Franck shares the misery of the daily routine of maternal abandonment. The picture she gives us of the mother’s preoccupation with her own desires for sex, cigarettes and alcohol, and her inability to nourish or clothe her children, is compelling. The road from bourgeois respectability to anti-bourgeois defiance is realised with an acuity that makes this book hard to put down.
"Overall Franck is served well by Imogen Taylor’s translation which is seamless. It conveys the original German in a natural and original English."