Read more
This reimagining of the Robinson Crusoe story is for lovers of JM Coetzee's Foe and of cult literature like Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers.
About the author
Lutz Seiler was born in 1963 in Gera, Thuringia, and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin and Stockholm. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize 2014, and the German Book Prize 2014.Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, and Philippe Jaccottet. She has won a number of awards including the 2015 ACFNY Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review. www.tesslewis.org
Summary
Winner of the German Book Prize, from the winner of the 2023 Georg Büchner Prize.
It is 1989, and a young literature student named Ed travels to the Baltic island of Hiddensee, a notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds with the East German state.
On Hiddensee, Ed joins the community of seasonal workers, led by the charismatic, enigmatic Kruso. At night, they secretly help the refugees who have come to the island seeking passage to the West. But Kruso is preoccupied by another kind of freedom — freedom of the mind.
As the wave of history washes over the German Democratic Republic, the friends’ grip on reality loosens and life on the island will never be the same.
Foreword
Winner of the German Book Prize.
Additional text
‘The poetic language and careful expression to the prose in Kruso make for an arresting read too, slightly odd and off-beat, but quite compelling. It's also a novel of big themes — freedom (personal and political), longing (in all its gradations), and mourning, in particular — and the narrative's general sense of drift, with these bobbling up constantly but never overwhelming the story, is particularly well done. A fine, big novel.’
