Siblings
Siblings
BRIGITTE REIMANN
Translated from the German by Lucy Jones
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023
1960. The border between East and West Germany has closed. For Elisabeth, a young painter, the GDR is her generation’s chance to build a glorious, egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the ever-wider chasm of the Party line; over them loom the twin specters of opportunity and fear, and the shadow of their defector brother Konrad, prompting a clash between idealism and suppression, familial loyalty, and desire.
Considered a master of socialist realism, Brigitte Reimann (1933–1973) wrote irreverent, autobiographical works that addressed issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the GDR. She wrote in her diaries: “I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I’ve liked too many men.” After her death from cancer in 1973 at the age of 39, she garnered a cult-like following. This is Reimann’s first work of fiction to appear in English.
Praise for Siblings
“There is something intoxicating about Reimann’s dense, jagged prose. It conveys hunger for a life that encompasses idealism with desire, the person with the cause, the self with the siblings, and the present with the past, all united by the force of personality.”—The Guardian
“In this 1963 novel by award-winning East German author Reimann, family love is tested by idealism and ideology in a divided Germany… Reimann’s work brings a historical moment convincingly to life.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The spirited English-language debut from Reimann (1933–1973) chronicles young love, idealism, and disillusionment in 1960s East Germany.”—Publishers Weekly
“Reimann was interested in the ‘I’ of the self at a time when the collective ‘we’ dominated—and the tension runs through Siblings...It makes her work feel modern, especially in an age of social media-fuelled self-revelation.”—The Sunday Times
Praise for Brigitte Reimann
“I’ve never read a book similar to [Brigitte Reimann’s I Have No Regrets] in my entire life, revealing a mixture of shyness, fragility, passion and boldness. It mounts to almost a literary lesson on how the most fragile are entitled to live life to the fullest.”—Adania Shibli, author of Minor Detail
“Her work deserves a much wider reading public outside Germany, where she remains best known for her ambiguously autobiographical final novel Franziska Linkerhand...The eight years of irregular diary entries that make up I Have No Regrets, edited in German by Angela Drescher and now translated into English by Lucy Jones, are a welcome introduction to Reimann’s work.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Reimann left behind a string of novels and several years’ worth of diaries that shed vivid light on life in East Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s.”—Charlie Connelly, The New European
Product Info
First Published: March 7, 2023
Fiction/Literary
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 192 Pages
Rights: NA
978-1-945492-66-2