End of Days

Winner of the Presigious Hans Fallada Prize and a bestseller in Europe, offers a unique view on twentieth-century German history.

The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five books, each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp. She is spared in the next chapter with the help of someone s intervention and returns to Berlin to become a respected writer. . . .

The End of Days is a brilliant novel of contingency and fate. A novel of incredible breadth, yet amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of German and German-Jewish history by one of the finest, most exciting authors alive (Michael Faber).

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Jenny Erpenbeck was born in 1967 in East Berlin. After finishing high school, she trained as a bookbinder and then studied drama and music theater direction. Erpenbeck has won various awards, including most recently the prestigious Swiss Sothurner Literature Prize, and her works have been translated worldwide.Susan Bernofsky is the acclaimed translator of Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Columbia University and lives in New York.