Possibility Of Happiness

Set in the shadow of the GDR, a gripping novel of social unrest and family secrets.

GERMAN BOOK PRIZE FINALIST 2023

‘We got used to the silence around us and to the stories we didn’t understand.’

Stine was just four years old when the country she was born into ceased to exist. Too young to remember life before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she grew up in a household haunted by loss and fracture. Her family struggled to find its place in a newly unified Germany, and questions about the past were met with silence – a silence that transformed their home into a place of fear.

In The Possibility of Happiness, Stine, now a writer herself, reckons with her family’s – and her country’s – complex history.

‘A tense, compelling story that examines the wounds of a generation caught between dictatorship and democracy’ The Bookseller

‘The book of the hour’ Die Zeit

ANNE RABE is a German writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. As a writer and essayist, Rabe's work explores her personal experience and the collective experience of living in East Germany and the aftermath of German Reunification. As such, Rabe has a significant role in the collective effort to reconcile East Germany's past and present. The Possibility of Happiness is her debut novel.

LIZZY KINCH is a translator of German literature. Her translations have appeared in Chicago Review, No Man's Land, La Piccioletta Barca and in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 Anthology. The Possibility of Happiness is her debut booklength translation.