Product Description

The bestselling voice of Europe's fastest-growing, fastest-living city: the new Berlin. 'The little jewellery box also held the red coral bracelet from Nikolai Sergeyevich. Its six hundred and seventy-five little coral beads were strung onto a silken thread, and they glowed as red as rage. My great-grandmother put the hairbrush down in her lap. She closed her eyes for a long time. Then she opened her eyes again, took the red coral bracelet from the little box and fastened it around her left wrist. Her skin was very white. That evening, for the first time in three years, she shared a meal with my great-grandfather.' Coral bracelets 'as red as rage' from Russian lovers; a sad old woman who nonetheless 'sometimes sang and winked with her left eye and laughed till the tears came'; country houses 'away from Berlin, linden trees out front, chestnuts in the back, sky above': 'The Summer House, Later' is an elegant, measured, reflective collection of stories which captures beautifully the promise of bright colours lying just out of reach of our grey daily routines. Set in and around Europe's fastest-growing, fastest-living city, these stories take as their starting point the monotony of modern urban life -- the endless antennas and chimneys, the pigeons in the gutters -- and looks beyond them to 'the narrow strip of sky over the rooftops'. The literary sensation of the year in her native Germany, Judith Hermann is a wonderfully talented young writer whose ability to find drama and beauty in the smallest, most trivial moments makes 'The Summer House, Later' a very special debut indeed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475508 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-17
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
'A daringly lyrical collection.' Oprah Magazine 'An elegant and perceptive reading on the emptiness that fills our lives. Its author is a master storyteller.' Independent 'A collection of striking distinction and poise. Some of the stories touch on brilliance. She can rival the best contemporary exponents of short fiction. Exceptional.' Sunday Business Post 'Tales of impressive quality and formidable originality.' Sunday Times 'Cool!told without sentimentality, drawing power from the precision of the language and from a laconic style that narrates but refuses to explain!a world of contingent events and casual relationships where happiness is experienced as memory or aspiration but never as present reality.' Peter Graves, TLS 'The Summer House, Later has an irresistible power! No word is too much and none out of place.' Neue Zurcher Zeitung 'The fragility of life's decisions are relayed without sentimentality, yet with a quiet melancholy. An exceptional debut.' Die Zeit 'The Summer House, Later has created a big impression with its clipped prose and gentle wisdom.' Guardian 'Judith Hermann's prose has conviction and is utterly of its time!' Focus 'Melancholy, muted, sometimes dramatic, but always pointed, precise and without pathos! The drama of Judith Hermann's stories comes from what is unsaid, from a tension between artful staging and that which really happens, but is only glimpsed.' Tagesspiegel

Oprah Magazine
'A daringly lyrical story collection.'

Elle
'Shimmers with dark wit and intelligence'

Customer Reviews

No need for this German to apologise
Set principally in Berlin, Hermann's collection of stories follows wistful twenty-somethings as they try to paint meaning into their lives. The backdrop is modern urban life, the characters visit galleries, snort coke and perfect disinterested gazes while working out the world around them. Like much of our homegrown talent, Herman is a 30-year-old female, in a modern European city. She sees and experiences the world of love, drugs, careers and family life that our urban writers are familiar with. but her characters come to us with questioning wisdom, they show us their mistakes and arrogances rather than an obsession with counting calories, cheating boyfriends and balancing credit cards.

A Rare Treat
The Summer House, Later was a collection of short stories which I thoroughly enjoyed. The stories varied greatly weaving a whole host of vibrant and original characters. Although each story seemed connected by the themes of love, solitude and relationships. I would recommend this book because the plots of each short story were most engaging and were so descriptive that it felt like there was a whole novel in just a few short pages. Which I suppose is the art of short story writing. I really savoured reading one short story each night before bed.