Higher Ground

by Anke Stelling, Lucy Jones (Translator)

Overview

A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed ...

Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family.

After Resi’s latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatisation and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her.

Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling’s novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781925938760
Publisher:	Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Publication date:	04/08/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	295 KB

About the Author

Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.

Lucy Jones studied German at UEA with W.G. Sebald, and worked as a freelance photographer before becoming a translator. She has lived in Berlin since 1998, where she heads Transfiction, a translators’ collective, and runs the Fiction Canteen reading series. She translates literary fiction, art texts, plays, and journalism from German. Her latest translations include Blueprint, by Theresia Enzensberger, I Have No Regrets: diaries 1955—1963, by Brigitte Reimann, and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, by Silke Scheuermann. She has published her own writing in SAND, Visual Verse, Pigeon Papers NY, and 3AM Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

03/29/2021

Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin. Resi is part of a group of friends she’s known since childhood. She is the poor one among them, and while all were leftists when they were younger, her friends have since found comfort and stability, and fail to acknowledge the class difference between themselves and Resi. Her friends all own apartments in a glitzy new co-op building, for instance, while Resi and her family sublet a cheap, decrepit flat nearby from her old friends Vera and Frank. After Resi publishes an essay about what it’s like to live in a “building without a name,” followed by a successful book, she’s served with an eviction notice and loses her friends, who can’t stomach Resi’s class critiques. Stelling frames the narrative as a long letter to Resi’s oldest child, Bea, in which Resi details her difficult childhood, her mother’s life, and the hypocrisy behind her privileged friends’ notion of self-determination. A wry warning to Bea on the first page—“Families are a hotbed of neuroses, and the ruler of this particular hotbed, our nest, is me”—suggests Resi’s version is open to interpretation. This biting class critique is hard to turn away from. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin… This biting class critique is hard to turn away from.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Stelling is brilliant on the quantum universe of parenting, the sheer unpredictability of it… The novel moves effortlessly between time periods in recent German history and builds up the composite picture of a generation that has too often seen many of its ideals disappear into trust funds… compelling.”
—Michael Cronin, The Irish Times

“German author Anke Stelling makes her English language debut with a swingeing screed against the privilege and hypocrisy of those who sell their souls to get ahead… A merciless tirade of a novel about class, so energized by rage and wit it’s impossible to tear your eyes from the page.”
—Cameron Woodhead, The Age

“Stelling is down-to-earth and quick with her criticism of the liberal elite… There is a deep satisfaction in watching [main character] Resi defy expectation and norm, frustrating those who wish she would just be thankful.”
—Connor Harrison, Necessary Fiction

“[A]n apologia pro vita mea… this sad, angry, and occasionally funny book works as a portrait of modern Germany and its social mores.”
—Bethane Patrick, LitHub

From the Publisher