Description
‘[An] absolute must-read. It has stunned and moved everyone who has read it’ Arifa Akbar, Independent This multi-award winning novel is the extraordinary story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman She is a baby who suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps not? Her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone. From a small Galician town at the turn of the twentieth century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin’s Moscow to modern-day Berlin, the twists of fate of her lives take us to some of the most vivid moments in European history. But it is our heroine’s choices, her struggles and her humanity – as she faces everything from Nazi-occupied Austria, Soviet secret police and the trials of old age – that make this book so profoundly moving, insightful and unforgettable. Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Hans Fallada Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and an English PEN Award. ‘The End of Days prises open the troubled box that is 20th-century European history and entrenches [Erpenbeck’s] position as the most brilliant European writer of my generation’ Neel Mukherjee, Irish Times Books of the Year ‘Jenny Erpenbeck makes swift work of the one-life-multiple-outcomes conceit touched on by Kate Atkinson and David Mitchell – and is the best of the bunch’ Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
