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Resi is a writer, living with her family in a Berlin apartment, where the lease is controlled by their closest friends. After Resi's latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the hard realities she now sees, Resi sets out to describe the world for her teenage daughter, as Berlin crumbles under the march of privatisation.
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.
Summary
You only have yourself to blame, you might say, but that’s not true. Some decisions take you down one path, and others another … It’s all about power.
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. 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.
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.
Additional text
‘Higher Ground is an absorbing novel that kept me interested from start to finish. Laced with dark humour, it’s very contemporary, skewering complacency and hypocrisy among the moneyed classes in Berlin … It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, and it’s often wise as well, even when she’s sending herself up.’
