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Back to Back begins in 1954, and centers around a single family living in Berlin in the socialist East. The mother, Käthe, is a sculptor of Jewish heritage, who has been leveraging her party connections in order to get more important and significant commissions. Devoted entirely to becoming a success in the socialist state, she is a cruel and completely unaffectionate mother, putting the party above her children, who she treats as if they were adults - there is no bourgeois mollycoddling in her household.
Thomas and Ella's father emigrated to West Germany after World War II, and they deeply long to see him again and dream of a life where they could be allowed to have the kind of childhood that other children enjoy. But Käthe's hard-nosed brutality - a reflection of the materialistic, unsentimental state in which she lives - means Thomas and Ella are unable to live the lives they want to - instead of his dream of becoming a writer, Thomas is forced to study geology, and do hard labor at a quarry as the practical part of his education. And Ella, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly introverted and strange - not least because the Stasi lodger the government has billetted in their home is beginning to abuse her…
Heartbreaking and shocking, Back to Back is a dark fairytale of East Germany, the story of a single family tragedy that reflects the greater tragedies of totalitarianism.
"Starred Review. Set in East Germany during the 1950s and '60s, this haunting novel depicts the constricted, oppressed lives of people living under the brutal policies of the country's Communist government... Heartbreaking reality." - Publishers Weekly
"Great for elevated book club discussion." - Library Journal
"Poetic and sensuous, but so unrelievedly grim that it borders on the unendurable." - Kirkus
"This novel, a deeply grim Sentimental Education from the early period of the "State of Workers and Farmers" leaves the reader lost for words. Was it really so bad? ... It was so much worse." - Saarbrücker Zeitung (Germany)
"Franck's prose is extremely delicate and yet so vivid that by the end of the book you feel like you've just seen a visually spectacular film - one that you will never forget." - Sie/Petra/Vital (Germany)
"The casualness with which Franck manages to evoke a mood of permanent mistrust, showing what it means when ones perceived reality does not correspond with the reality of others, with the reality of those in charge, is devastating. Rarely has the reader been so enjoyably on such shaky ground." - Spiegel.com (Germany)
"A virtuoso creator of poetically charged moods... never before has East Germany been so radically depicted as dead at birth as in the arresting, magical narrative web of Julia Franck." - Literarische Welt
This information about Back to Back was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Hans Weingartz
Julia Franck is a German writer. She studied German Literature and American Studies at the Free University of Berlin and spent some time in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala. She worked as an editor for Sender Freies Berlin and contributed to various newspapers and magazines. She lives with her children in Berlin.
Franck has received several awards, most notably the German Book Prize in 2007 and the 3sat Award at the esteemed Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in 2000. In 2010 The Blind Side of the Heart was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize as well as the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize.
Her books have been translated over 35 languages. "West" (2014) is a film adaptation of her novel Lagerfeuer.
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