Synopses & Reviews
From the acclaimed author of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine — “a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience” (The New Yorker).
Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany. When his grandmother — a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna — moved them from the Motherland it was in search of a better life. But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany: the doctors and teachers are incompetent, the food is toxic, and the Germans are generally untrustworthy.
His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an incompetent, clueless weakling since he was a child and she’d spend the day sitting in the back of his classroom to be sure he came to no harm. While he may be a dolt in his grandmother's eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbor, Nina. When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max’s grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head. Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max’s all-powerful grandmother.
Alina Bronsky writes of family dysfunction and machinations with a droll and biting humor, a tremendous ear for dialog, and a generous heart that is forgiving of human weakness. While Max’s grandmother recalls the outrageously nasty Rosa from Bronsky’s best-selling book, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, this is a more tender and moving family portrait. Here the best-selling and internationally renowned author, while never abandoning her trademark and razor-sharp wit, tells a family story through a young boy’s eyes. Max, over the course of the story, will appreciate that people’s questionable behaviour may often be motivated by sadness.
Review
“Thrilling and moving in equal measure.” Berliner Zeitung
Review
“Bronsky is not only a master of the unwritten, but also a magician of perspective and, most importantly, of empathy towards her characters.” Die Tageszeitung
Review
“Alina Bronsky has written a little masterpiece. Filled with dark humor, at times cynical, My Grandmother’s Braid is an extraordinarily readable novel, rich in dialogue, and extremely entertaining.” Gießener Allgemeine
About the Author
Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010); The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly; Just Call Me Superhero (Europa, 2014), and Baba Dunja's Last Love (Europa, 2016). Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.
Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors such Wolfgang Herrndorf, Charlotte Roche, and four books by Alina Bronsky. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and Inked, among other publications, and he spent several years as a staff editor at Playboy magazine, where he edited Hunter S. Thompson, John Dean, and Harvey Pekar, among others. He is the author of Burning Down the Haus, a history of political struggle and punk music in East Germany. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.