What Darkness Was

Name: What Darkness Was
Price: 24.99 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9780857428325

Inka Parei, Katy Derbyshire

$24.99

Paperback

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English

Seagull Books London Ltd
01 July 2023

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature

Germany, 1977. Close to death, an old man collapses and struggles to his bed. The sounds of the endless night unsettle him, triggering images, questions and memories. In What Darkness Was, Inka Parei allows the reader to inhabit a singular German mind. Precise and observant-but uncomprehending and on the brink of hysteria-the old man wracks his brain as the questions flow like water: Why did he inherit the building he now lives in? Why did he leave the city that was his home for so long? Is he even here voluntarily? And who was that suspicious stranger on the stairs? Lying in bed, the old man is aware that these questions may be the last puzzles he ever solves.

Combining tight prose with a compulsive delight in detail, What Darkness Was presents a dynamic portrait of the West German soul from World War II through the German Autumn of 1977-a series of killings, bombings and robberies by the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other left-wing protest groups.

'Of all the Holocaust novel genres, the most interesting is often the one that doesn't describe clearly defined horrors . . . Inka Parei's What Darkness Was takes this forward, acknowledging that history has been made in Germany since the Holocaust, and that it too can be poorly understood and put into a larger continuum of culture, and lost or denied culture. Set in late 1977 in West Germany and within the addled, lost consciousness of an old man, What Darkness Was isn't a novel of direct connections, of completeness, of action and reaction, or of explanations for the reader, but instead of gestures toward, of using abstraction, atmosphere to set the reader up to find how it comes together, and what it has to offer from the past and for the future.' - Three Percent

'What Darkness Was gives shape, sound and presence to a world deprived of dimension and leaking its memory.' - Ron Slate, On the Seawall.

By: Inka Parei
Translated by: Katy Derbyshire
Imprint: Seagull Books London Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm, Spine: 10mm
ISBN: 9780857428325
ISBN 10: 0857428322
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Pages: 128
Publication Date: 01 July 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Inka Parei lives in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, with her son, writing and tutoring emerging literary talents. Her novels The Shadow-Boxing Woman (2011), What Darkness Was (2013) and The Cold Centre (2014) are available from Seagull Books.

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What Darkness Was

Inka Parei, Katy Derbyshire

$24.99

Paperback

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