Description

From her childhood in Romania, in a village ‘as small as a thimble on the edge of the world’, through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Muller’s story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory and trauma, and on what it was to live and write during Ceausescu’s regime: on the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; on the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century – and how they remain with us in the twenty-first.

Publisher Review

Superb... Muller articulates well the pain and anxiety she suffered as an enemy of the state. It's heartening to learn how she regained her strength and found ways, however small, to stand up to the Securitate -- (Five stars) * Telegraph * The Village on the Edge of the World is a rare document that shows just how much darkness can go into prose as luminous as that of Muller * TLS * A profound delight. In this seemingly casual tour inside the mind of one of the century's great writers there are frequent, electrifying moments of immense insight - each one feels like a trapdoor opening into a reality you realise you were, till now, just skimming the surface of. Muller's thinking is glorious to share in, and her thoughts have never been more relevant -- Anna Funder A vivid reflection on life and literature * FT * Muller is an unnervingly acute observer and the account here of the nightmarish texture of persecution is equal in its intensity to any in fiction... The Village on the Edge of the World is an autobiographical work of rare and unsettling honesty, an extraordinary and uncompromising telling of an extraordinary and uncompromising life * Literary Review * Certain to be brilliant * New Statesman * A clinical and piercing reflection on life under tyranny, on the compromises that so many have to make, on choices and consequences... Heart-stopping * Financial Times * Beautifully written and sincerely inspiring * Telegraph * A powerful indictment of life under dictatorship, chronicles the lies, surveillance and intimate betrayals of a totalitarian bureaucracy that killed its own citizens in the name of a misguided revolutionary nationalism * Observer *