Read. Talk. Share.
Read our book of the month and join us for a discussion online! Simply register via Eventbrite to receive the Zoom access info. Let's keep reading and sharing experiences with the material!
Book Klub is free and open to everyone interested, but participants must purchase the individual texts themselves and are expected to have read the title to be discussed prior to the meeting.
Feel free to read this month’s selection,
Herkunft (English:
Where You Come From) in English or its original German. The discussion will be in English.
Registration
About the novel:
Winner of the German Book Prize. From the internationally acclaimed author of
Before the Feast and
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone comes a prize-winning novel that asks: what makes us who we are?
In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s
Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.
Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure,
Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons’ den. Translated by Damion Searls, it’s a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
About the author:
© Katja Sämann
Saša Stanišić was born in Višegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel,
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into thirty-one languages;
Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair prize. His current novel
Where You Come From (Tin House), won the German Book Prize.
Interested in hearing from the author? Watch the
recording our online talk with Saša Stanišić, translator Damion Searls, and writer and translator Jennifer Croft, presented in December in partnership with Third Place Books and Community Bookstore (Brooklyn).
Back
