THE STORY BEGINS with my great-grandmother, born a farmer's daughter on the first day of the new century in a village on the North Sea.Alma has grown up on her family's stories.The sowing in the spring, the haymaking in summer, the potato harvest in autumn. The day Grandmother heard the planes come, and knew the war had begun. The dark-eyed Austrian soldier who approached her as she walked home from the baker's.But woven into the picture of the past Alma ha...

For readers of Nelio Biedermann and Olga Tokarczuk, f****rom a dazzling new voice in European literature, this compact, magical realist epic traces the fate of a farming family living on the edge of the German empire over one momentous century, through the keen, imaginative eyes of its youngest and final descendant.At the house on Osterstieg, in a village on the North Sea, where the vegetables turn white with grief and the dead don’t leave so much as linger, girls ...

For readers of Nelio Biedermann and Olga Tokarczuk, f****rom a dazzling new voice in European literature, this compact, magical realist epic traces the fate of a farming family living on the edge of the German empire over one momentous century, through the keen, imaginative eyes of its youngest and final descendant.At the house on Osterstieg, in a village on the North Sea, where the vegetables turn white with grief and the dead don’t leave so much as linger, girls ...