We are born and we die – but many things could happen in between. Which life do we end up living?’

From one of the most daring voices in European fiction, this is a story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman. She is a baby who suffocates in the cradle. Or she lives to become an adult and dies beloved. Or she dies betrayed. Or her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone.

Moving from a small Galician town at the turn of the century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin’s Moscow to present-day Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck hones in on the moments when life follows a particular branch and ‘fate’ suddenly emerges from the sly interplay between history, character and pure chance.