08/19/2024

The gorgeous latest from Seiler (In Case of Loss) offers an intimate view of a German family’s reckoning with the end of the Cold War. In the autumn of 1989, as East Germany begins to fall apart, 20-something Carl Bischoff is called home from university to the small village where he was raised. With the border about to open, his parents plan to leave for a West German refugee camp. They ask Carl to stay behind—he imagines himself “the rearguard” of their house. Very soon, though, protecting his childhood home is no longer enough, as “somewhere out there, history was raging.” Carl sets off for East Berlin, where he squats in a bomb-scarred building in Prenzlauer Berg and falls in with a group of German and Russian artists and punks led by an enigmatic man who’s called Shepherd because he lives with his goat. Seiler crafts a fascinating intergenerational exploration of German reunification, as Carl comes to see his parents as people with wants and dreams like him, “as if they’d only just begun to exist.” It’s an exceptional story of fresh starts. (Oct.)

"A rich, vivid tale about new beginnings and fractured utopias." —Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times "A Best Book of 2023, Fiction in Translation (UK Edition)

"The fragmentary style of Star 111 recalls much of the later work of Grass [...] The great ingenuity of Seiler’s narrative lies in the displacement that it effects between Carl’s exploits and those of his distant parents, from whom he receives regular letters written in a floridly formal style." —Stuart Walton, The Hong Kong Review of Books

"The author’s shimmering, ironic and musical prose—impeccably translated by Tess Lewis—captures a moment both archaic and profoundly real. Utopian and matter-of-fact, it is both timeless and obsessed with the minutiae of its time." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

"Seiler's dry wit and command of language, which can itself be musical, keep the pages humming." —Kirkus Reviews

"There aren’t many books that can be cited as the missing link between Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and still fewer that could live up to the comparison, but Lutz Seiler (with impeccable assistance from Tess Lewis) makes it look easy. Star 111 is a brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun. A stellar achievement."  —Will Ashon