Love in a time of upheaval: the bestselling author’s captivating new saga set in Danzig.
DANZIG #1
by Hilke Sellnick
Penguin Germany, June 2023
Danzig, 1856. When young Johanna Berendt finds herself standing in front of the big villa in Langgasse Street, she feels deeply embarrassed. She eloped with a pianist just a few months ago, but now she’s back and hoping that her family will forgive her. Yet a shock awaits Johanna: her father has died, and her brother is now in charge of the family and their long-established merchant business. And he has no time for his freedom-loving sister.
When Berthold Forster, a good-natured and considerably older shipyard owner, proposes to Johanna, she seizes the opportunity to free herself from her brother’s sway. At Forster’s side, she even develops an interest in shipbuilding, and Georg, Forster’s son from his first marriage, is put out when she expresses a desire to help run the place. Yet Johanna is intelligent and courageous enough to pursue her vision, and Georg soon realises he has met his match – in business, of course. Or do his feelings run deeper?
Hilke Sellnick‘s bestselling historical novels have won her hundreds of thousands of fans over the years. With this first book in a brilliant new series for Penguin, she is now showing her readers a different side to herself. Set in nineteenth-century Danzig, it tells the addictive story of a young woman who defies social convention, turns an old shipyard into a successful business, and fights for love.
Taxidermist Sonja lives all on her own deep in the woods. She avoids all human contact like the plague, and the inhabitants of the nearby village are in any case convinced she’s a witch. Her clientele is mostly rather suspect, and many of the jobs they give her are unpleasant and illegal. When she meets a young man and feels herself falling for him, she decides to escape her hermit’s life. To do that, she first has to take on one last well-paid and very, very illegal job. But then long-buried trauma and family secrets raise their head – and soon she is not the only one who’s in mortal danger…
A model Nazi mother who teaches others how to raise their children while refusing to speak of the great loss she has suffered; a cook travelling across Germany in the summer of 1945 who would rather make love to women than to her employer; a lawyer and single mother who unexpectedly inherits a flat in Wrocław and discovers a hitherto unknown Polish branch of her family – these women are all bound together by a century of war and post-war life, flight, expulsion and violence.
Munich, 1941. Students Hans and Alex don’t seem to have much in common – until, one day, they both duck out of military training to discuss art and literature instead of practice standing to attention. From that day on, they are close friends, and Hans is a welcome guest at Alex’s « discussion parties ». But war is their constant companion, and the urge to speak out against it grows ever stronger within both of them. Their plans are risky, especially when Hans’s younger sister, who mustn’t at any cost find out about their intentions – moves to Munich…
Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.