Helen Gregg
Assistant to the Director
German Book Office
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F + 1 (212) 794 - 2870
gregg@newyork.gbo.org
May Book of the Month
"Broken Glass Park"
"Broken Glass Park" was written by Alina Bronsky and translated by Tim Mohr. It was released by Europa Editions on March 30, 2010.
The heroine of this engrossing and thoroughly contemporary novel is seventeen-year-old Sascha Naimann. Sascha was born in Moscow, but now lives in Berlin with her two younger siblings and, until recently, her mother. She is precocious, independent, street-wise, and, since her stepfather murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her companions, she doesn’t dream of escaping from the tough housing project where they live. Sascha’s dreams are different: she longs to write a novel about her beautiful but naïve mother and she wants to end the life of Vadim, the man who brutally murdered her. Sascha’s story, as touching as any in recent literature, is that of a young woman consumed by two competing impulses, one celebrative and redemptive, the other murderous. In a voice that is candid and self-confident, at times childlike and at others all too mature, Sascha relates the universal and timeless struggle between those forces that can destroy us, and those that lead us back from sorrow and pain to life itself.
Born in Jekaterinburg, Russia, in 1978, the author now lives in Frankfurt, Germany. Broken Glass Park, nominated for the prestigious Bachmann Prize among others, is her first novel. Alina Bronsky is a pseudonym.
Tim Mohr spent the 1990s as a club DJ in Berlin and much of the next decade as a staff editor at Playboy magazine, where he worked with such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Taibbi, and Duff McKagan. He is currently at work on his own book, a history of the punk music scene in East Germany.
"Whether it's autobiographical or not, Bronsky writes with a gritty authenticity and unputdownable propulsion, capturing the egotism and need of a girl just beginning to understand her own power."
- Vogue
"Riveting." - Publishers Weekly
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