Overview

August is Christa Wolf’s last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real-life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, the story unfolds through the eyes of August, a young patient who has lost both his parents to the war. He adores an older girl, Lilo, a rebellious teenager who controls the wards. Sixty years later, August reflects on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, August offers a new entry into Christa Wolf’s work and, incidentally, her first and only male protagonist. More than a literary artifact, this new novel is a perfectly constructed story of a quiet life well lived. For both August and Christa Wolf, the past never dies. ‘August fits the mold for the kind of memory piece that has even become a genre: an older man looking back upon his life and revisiting its twists and turns, its more difficult questions. But August isn’t interested in understanding anything. And this is the key.’ — Necessary Fiction

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Christa Wolf's (1929-2011) other works include the ground-breaking Cassandra, Patterns of Childhood and The Quest for Christa T. She has been awarded many prizes, among them the B chner Prize of the German Academy of Language and Poetry the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Geschwister Scholl Prize of the city of Munich. Katy Derbyshire is a translator and coeditor of no man's land, an online literary magazine of contemporary German writing in English.

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