1000 coils of fear
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A young woman attends a play about the Berlin Wall coming down and is the only Black person in the audience.
She is sitting with her boyfriend and four neo-Nazis show up.
In New York, she witnesses Trump’s victory and later awakes to panicked messages from friends.
Engaging in a witty question and answer with herself, the narrator looks at our rapidly changing times and tells the story of her family: her mother, a punk in East Germany who never had the freedom she dreamed of and her absent Angolan father. But in the background of everything is the memory of her twin brother, who died when they were nineteen.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Priscilla
Layne
Priscilla Layne is associate professor of German and adjunct associate professor of African, African American, and diaspora studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, and her current book project is on Afro-German Afrofuturism.
Priscilla Layne is associate professor of German and adjunct associate professor of African, African American, and diaspora studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, and her current book project is on Afro-German Afrofuturism.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Debut novel about origin, loss, loneliness, and enjoyment of life and the role of a person given by society. Core topic is racism and the related fear. The story is heartwarming and profound, but also written in an exiting and humorous tone at the same time. In Germany considered as “genre refreshing”.