Darkenbloom

A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.

The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never really piece it together again afterwards. Because some of those who possessed a part of it will already be dead. Or they’re lying, or their memories are bad.

It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.

But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.

Still, though, nobody talks about the war.

Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.

Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.

Until a body is found.

Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.

Eva Menasse was born in Vienna in 1970 and has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She began her career as a journalist, and has published several bestselling novels and short story collections, as well as essay collections. Her accolades include the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, the Jonathan Swift Prize, the Austrian Book Prize, the Ludwig Börne Prize, and a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have sold 500,000 copies.

Charlotte Collins studied English Literature at Cambridge University and worked as an actor and radio journalist in Germany and the UK before becoming a literary translator. Her co-translation, with Ruth Martin, of Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life. Other translations include Seethaler’s The Tobacconist, Homeland by Walter Kempowski, and Olga by Bernhard Schlink.