Kaethe Shalk faces a new life of boundless complexity when the Berlin Wall comes down and the ruin of the East stands in stark contrast to the exuberance of the West.
Having lived in America for many years, Kaethe Shalk returns to Berlin to try to come to terms with the Berlin of her youth. Her journey from America to the broken ground of contemporary Germany becomes an act of recovery: of the lives intertwined by politics and passion, of memory and the invented self, and of Kaethe’s search for a daughter lost to her, now grown and living in isolation from her mother’s past and present, somewhere in vast, resurgent Berlin.
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“Kai Maristed’s lucid psychological portraits connect us to familiar characters and unsettling places across continents and time warps. Her story leads us into a history of loves and betrayals to discover the mysteries at the shifting edges of people’s lives. Her lyric writing is charged with dead cold realism. Maristed is a fearless guide into the secret country of the self.” — Maria Flook, New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Eden
“Kai Maristed’s lucid psychological portraits connect us to familiar characters and unsettling places across continents and time warps. Her story leads us into a history of loves and betrayals to discover the mysteries at the shifting edges of people’s lives. Her lyric writing is charged with dead cold realism. Maristed is a fearless guide into the secret country of the self.”
“An elegant, intricate, and deeply satisfying novel.”
“Emotionally engaging for adults and mature young people, who will empathize with a woman who struggles with the baggage of a painful past. Ward reads with a trained, melodious voice paced with precision and provides a good handling of German words and phrases.”
“Johanna Ward narrates with sensitivity to Kaethe’s nervous energy and anxieties. Ward’s pace reflects the impatience of a mother who feels she has already missed too much and must act with dispatch to recover what she can of the past, but who finds it all fundamentally overwhelming.”
“Abounding in idealism, lust, betrayal, and re-emerging hope, this compelling portrait of a person whose life has been swept up in both the personal and the political realities of the Cold War is an eye-opener.”
“The prose is stupendous as Maristed’s entangled layers of plot allow a look at modern Berlin through the eyes of its turbulent past.”
" This book was suggested to me (sorry whoever suggested it). It was painfully read, the writing seemed really forced and awkward and it just never came together. "
" Smutty book. "
" Interesting glimpses into life in Berlin, but it struggled to keep my attention. "
Kai Maristed has studied and worked in Cambridge, Tokyo, Berlin, and Munich. She is the author of a short-story collection and three novels. She lives near Boston.
Johanna Ward (a.k.a. Kate Reading) is an Audie Award–winning narrator and has received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. She is also a theater actor in the Washington, DC, area and has been a member of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, among others. She and her husband live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their two children.
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