"A Foreign Country" by: [Germany] Jenny Epenbeck Publisher: Beijing Daily Press

Introduction
☄️Highlights of the work:
🌟 The representative works of Jenny Erpenbeck, one of the most outstanding novelists in contemporary Germany and the "weaver bird of German literature", are introduced for the first time.
🌟 Selected as one of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century and shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Prize, "The Hometown of the Away" tells the story of a lakeside villa on the outskirts of Berlin and the people who have lived there for decades in a tone as detached as an iceberg. The turbulent historical process of Germany in the 20th century tells its own story in stories of passion, pain, regret and reconciliation.
🌟 Extraordinary comprehensive imagination, profound historical consciousness, telling the stories of people and things lost in the turning point of history from the unorthodox perspective of women - "Hometown of Families"'s exquisite use and re-narration of historical geography constantly refreshes our cognition and imagination of historical events and personal will.
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☄️Recommendation:
🏔 "The most outstanding and important German-language novelist of his generation." - James Wood (famous literary critic)
🏔 "The intersection of historical events and personal will is a recurring theme in her books, and the unorthodox perspectives of her heroines allow them to maintain an oblique angle with 'history', thus refreshing the reader's understanding and thinking of this subject." - Daniel Mendelsohn (famous literary critic)
🏔 "One of the great achievements of her work is that it implicitly shows the majestic progress of history through the stories of people and things lost in the turning points of history... The 'past' is placed under the surface of the 'present', but its shape will eventually emerge." - Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker
🏔 "One of the finest and most exciting living writers... Erpenbeck's novels are mostly stories about a young woman, but also allegories of a country full of dark secrets. In The Outcast, the allegorical color is toned down, history is more explicitly involved, and the narrative canvas is wider. The book is not long, but its achievement and response are huge." - Michel Faber (famous novelist)
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☄️Content introduction:
Shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Prize (2008) and selected as one of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century (2019).
An architect built his dream summer villa on the lakeside outside Berlin, but he didn't know what this land had experienced and would experience: a young woman went crazy and drowned in the lake; the Jewish neighbors sold their properties at a low price and disappeared; the Red Army requisitioned the house; the writer who escaped from the Nazi regime returned from exile and wanted to drag out an ideal home where she could live for a long time from under the ruins; decades later, after the reunification of East and West Germany, her granddaughter was forced to give up the property rights, and the person who took over was the heir of the original builder...
In the same place, residents from different eras come and go. The huge invisible force of history constantly erodes human efforts to establish lasting values, and above all passions, pains, reconciliations and destinies stands a landscape that cannot be truly changed by any madness or turmoil.
The poetic narrative of "Hometown of Families" that is "as transcendent as an iceberg" is an echo of Germany's vicissitudes over the past century. From the Weimar Republic to the years after reunification, twelve fragments of life form a mosaic in which the past and the future collapse. The real narrator of the story is time, "eternal life has existed in the lifetime of individual human beings."