The End of Days - Tapa dura

'Erpenbeck has honed an extraordinary gift for focusing the sweep of European history into intimate moments, captured in prose of a haunting beauty and tenderness. The End of Days compresses almost 100 years of war, exile, revolution and persecution into rapt snapshots from a single life. Hypnotically involving' --Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'In Erpenbeck's world, everything is connected. Stylistically, this is conveyed through tiny parallels and repetitions - elusive leitmotifs that echo across the protagonist's alternate lives. Indeed, the book's basic theme of birth and death indirectly recurs in the minutiae of its imagery. In this way, Erpenbeck deploys the smallest details to recapitulate her ideas. The wisdom of this novel lies in the way its form subtly subverts death's permanence' --Literary Review

'Concise and moving ... Jenny Erpenbeck made swift work of the one-life-multiple-outcomes conceit touched on by Kate Atkins, David Mitchell (and, this year, by Claire North) - and was, I think, the best of the bunch' --'Books of the Year', Daily Telegraph

'If you think this sounds like Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, think again. The End of Days owes little to Groundhog Day and more to Hegel and Marx. That's not to say that the book is not moving or involving, as it deals with Jewish persecution, political repression and the struggle to survive, but its effects are arrived at in a very different way from what we have come to expect in the main from the Anglo-American novel' --Sunday Times

'Reading Jenny Erpenbeck is like falling under hypnosis... Her wisdom feels uncannily ancient and The End of Days is shot through with an insight that almost blinds' --Guardian

'If you think this sounds like Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, think again. The End of Days owes little to Groundhog Day and more to Hegel and Marx. That's not to say that the book is not moving or involving, as it deals with Jewish persecution, political repression and the struggle to survive, but its effects are arrived at in a very different way from what we have come to expect in the main from the Anglo-American novel' --Sunday Times

'Jenny Erprenbeck's The End of Days prises open the troubled box that is 20th-century European history and entrenches her position as the most brilliant European writer of my generation' --'Book of the Year' chosen by Neel Mukherjee, Irish Times

'Astonishing and deeply humane... The End of Days shows Erpenbeck's incredible genius with Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth echoes' --BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review

'Erpenbeck deftly handles the constant shifts in narrative throughout this complex novel. Hats off to Susan Bernofsky for her translating skills. It's a masterly piece of work' --Susan Osborne, A Life in Books

'Astonishing and startlingly powerful... In Susan Bernofsky's lucid, seamless translation, The End of Days emerges as a necessary and illumination novel, alight with intelligence and meaning' --Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman

'Masterful... This is a beautifully written novel, impressively translated by Susan Bernofsky. The End of Days is a compelling reminder that worrying about the unknowable will do nothing to delay the inevitable' --Financial Times

'A genuine European masterpiece' --TLS Books of the Year
'The style of Jenny Erpenbeck has often been described as incantatory, and The End of Days has the same dizzying emotional reach as her previous work. This profound meditation reaches to the heart of a cultural world of spiritual intensity, social utopianism and political catastrophe that has variously shaped German literature - and it is expertly translated by Susan Bernofsky' --Times Literary Supplement

'We are born and we die - but many things could happen in between. Which life do we end up living?' From one of the most daring voices in European fiction, this is a story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman. She is a baby who barely survives beyond her first breath, and suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps not? Her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone. Moving from a small Galician town at the turn of the century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin's Moscow to present-day Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck homes in on the moments when life follows a particular branch and 'fate' suddenly emerges from the sly interplay between history, character and pure chance. Fully alive with ambition and ideas, The End of Days is a novel that pulls apart the threads of destiny and allows us to see the present and the past anew.