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!
Our online book club 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,
The End of Days, in English or its original German (
Aller Tage Abend). The discussion will be in English.
Registration
About the May selection:
The End of Days (German: Aller Tage Abend)
By Jenny Erpenbeck , trans. by Susan Bernofsky
320 pp
"Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize,
The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. 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 after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there….
A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision,
The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century." (New Directions Publishing)
About the author:
© Nina Subin
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She is the author of several works of fiction, including
The Book of Words;
Visitation;
Go, Went, Gone; and
Not a Novel. Her works have been critically acclaimed and awarded with numerous prizes;
The End of Days won the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize. Erpenbeck lives in Berlin.
Back
