10/19/2020
Grattan’s striking and surprising debut traces the parallel fates of a town in the former East Germany and a mother and her two children who struggle to make it their home. Beate Haas’s parents defected from East Germany with the 12-year-old Beate, settling in upstate New York. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate receives the unexpected news that she’s inherited her family’s home in Kritzhagen, Germany. Recently divorced, Beate decides to move there along with her children, 13-year-old Michael and 12-year-old Adela. However, the Kritzhagen she returns to is not the one she left: it’s now a ghost town of graffiti, abandoned houses, and unreliable electricity. Beate flounders, sleeping all day and frequenting a bar at night, and her once inseparable children drift apart. Michael makes friends quickly and begins to explore his sexuality; Adela grows close with a cousin and buries herself in books about the Holocaust. As Beate and her children’s fortunes ebb and flow, so, too, do the conditions of the town, and Grattan shines in his depiction of Kritzhagen as it evolves over the years from a place of refugee encampments and neo-Nazis to a chic vacation town. At turns funny and frightening, this is a moving, memorable portrait of a family and town in turmoil. (Mar.)
"A wonderful, immersive debut novel . . . Our lives are time spent, and it’s a deep, expansive pleasure to spend a little of ours as these characters spend their own. Most extraordinarily, Grattan gives us not only life, but a good life, the rarity of which in fiction (and increasingly, reality) is a shame." —Patrick Nathan, The New York Times Book Review
"A sharply accomplished first novel . . . Grattan’s rarer achievement is to have written a historical novel whose when and where, however well established, are not really determinative, and whose people remain individual riddles instead of political integers . . . Fiction, as always, will have to play catch-up, which is what Thomas Grattan’s career now seems splendidly to be doing." —Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker
"A narrative description alone fails to convey the dazzling, deeply loving, obscenely clever prose at the heart of Grattan’s novel. The Recent East is filled with many little landmines of sentences buried in each paragraph that nearly makes you stop and gasp. It’s all the small details tossing around this continent-tossed family that makes this novel such a joy." —Christopher Bollen, Interview
"Thomas Grattan's debut novel is an epic in every sense of the word — in narrative scope, of course, but also in the way it's breaking new ground for the genre . . . It's a lofty project for a debut writer, but Grattan pulls it off seamlessly. " —Selja Rankin, Entertainment Weekly
"Thomas Grattan’s debut novel takes the 'decades-spanning family saga' genre to new queer heights." —Keely Weiss, Harper's Bazaar
"Moving fluidly through time and space, Thomas Grattan's The Recent East offers an intimate, intergenerational portrait of a family . . . With prose that feels like life, Grattan captures the whirls of excitement and letdown that accompany a queer person's [coming-of-age]." —Meredith Talusan, them.
"A sprawling, captivating story of identity, displacement, family, and belonging, Thomas Grattan's debut novel is at turns heart-breaking and life-affirming, a necessary reminder of the different ways we can find, or create, a home for ourselves . . . The novel goes back and forth in time, offering a fascinating, clear-eyed view of the quickly changing landscape of Germany in the late 20th century, but what it does best of all is show the ways in which we are all of us, always, searching to better understand who we are, and how we fit into an ever-changing world." —Kristen Iversen, Refinery29
"An arresting and resplendent family saga." —O, the Oprah Magazine
"Thomas Grattan's written one of my favorite debuts of the year. It's a queer coming-of-age (and beyond) story that manages to avoid all of the usual cliches typically associated with the genre . . . The Recent East is one of those books that I couldn't put down." —Jeffrey Masters, The Advocate
"Grattan is a masterful writer when it comes to finding the odd and alien struggles of our present-day predicament. He is deft at exposing our longing, especially in being queer, to dispel and discard old myths and crushing ideals, to defect and cross borders in imagining a stranger, freer and more diverse home." —Walter Holland, Lambda Literary
"A nuanced fabric in which a vision of everyday doings seem to be the larger point. This intelligent, quirky family, moving through time and change, remains strongly connected, devoted to one another throughout. Grattan, a New Yorker with German roots, has an observant eye and a way with dialogue." —Drew Hart, ArtsFuse
"[A] striking and surprising debut . . . At turns funny and frightening, this is a moving, memorable portrait of a family and town in turmoil." —Publishers Weekly
"Grattan is a graceful writer and keen observer of family dynamics; the domestic themes, realist style, and emphasis on German culture can’t help but recall Jonathan Franzen . . . An ambitious, artful, and winding tale of a family in search of its moorings." —Kirkus
"I fell in love with The Recent East, which is absolutely spellbinding. Thomas Grattan’s writing on family, displacement, and queerness is so well wrought, intimate, and mesmerizing. This is an exquisite and profound novel. I will be pushing it in the hands of everyone I know." —Etaf Rum, author of A Woman is No Man
"Between life and death, as The Recent East would have it, we move 'from place to memory.' This remarkably humane first novel manages the quantum feat of restoring Cold War-era Germany to both categories at once. Its powerful intelligence and crystalline observations revive a set of memories - the late '60s, the early '90s - touched with a bygone world's Ostalgie. Yet in his enormous sensitivity, his feel for character, and his wry humor, Thomas Grattan also pins down precisely our own contentious place in history - our own riven and intimate selves. All in all: Ein Wunder!" —Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
"Thomas Grattan explores the complex forces at work within families, forces that can both impede and facilitate the formation of individual identity. In this multi-generational, multi-continent journey, the threads of a family fray and interweave against the backdrop of immigration and political change, yielding moments of profound isolation and profound intimacy. Grattan has an enthralling voice and a deep understanding of the subtleties of human relationships. The Recent East is a bold and tender debut." —Helen Phillips, author of The Need
"An epic that blossoms more than sprawls, The Recent East is capacious in its scope and generously, exquisitely controlled in its pacing and language. This is not a novel that falls through on its promises; every sentence renews the possibility of entering the world of this book, every page offers a new seduction." —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
10/01/2020
From Iowa Writers' Workshop grad Brown, The Lowering Days tracks what happens when an about-to-reopen paper mill collapses in flames; for many working-class people in Maine's Penobscot Valley, the mill would have been an essential source of jobs, but for the Penobscot people, it's a source of pollution wrecking ancestral lands (50,000-copy first printing). With TV rights just sold to Heyday Films after a fierce auction, Day's In the Quick features the newly designated engineer on a space station, who believes that a spacecraft launched years ago and powered by her late uncle's supposedly failed fuel cells is still out there somewhere. From Brooklyn College MFA grad and middle school teacher Grattan, The Recent East unfolds the story of a woman who defected from East Germany and returns after the Wall falls, leaving upstate New York with her teenage children to reclaim her parents' mansion (50,000-copy first printing). Irish-born, London-based Nolan's unnamed narrator launches an affair with a charismatic but unstable writer and commits numerous Acts of Desperation to hold him (35,000-copy first printing). Won in an eight-way auction, Polzin's Brood is an intimate look at a woman ushering her four chickens through Minnesota cold and heat, tornados and predators. In The Northern Reach, Winslow portrays a small coastal Maine village whose residents are just getting by, with the narrative centered on a woman who lost her son at sea and is puzzled by a schooner under sail yet motionless across the water (75,000-copy first printing).
2020-11-27
A broken family makes an uncomfortable transition into former Communist Germany in this moody debut novel.
Grattan’s family drama centers on three characters: Beate Haas, who as a girl escaped from East Germany with her parents in 1968, and the two children she later had in the United States, Adela and Michael. In 1990, with the Berlin Wall collapsed, Beate inherits her family home in Kritzhagen, a small town in the former East. Adela and Michael, 12 and 13 at the time, uneasily adjust to a place that “had gone from prom queen to old maid in a single season”: Michael keeps busy looting abandoned houses while furtively exploring relationships with men while Adela lends support to the demonized occupants of a nearby refugee camp. Beate, meanwhile, despondent after splitting with her husband, wanders the streets at night, eventually stumbling into a job cutting hair at a bar. In the early going, the book feels like a gothic novel with a Brutalist severity: The characters are so downcast and the home so haunted by the past that emotional escape seems impossible. But when the narrative leaps back into the 1970s and forward to the 21st century, the novel brightens as the characters’ motivations and experiences deepen. Michael settles into a job running a bar with a Stasi theme, Beate pursues new relationships, and Adela leaves the country just as her mom did. In the meantime, cousins and lovers provide emotional support while neofascism and homophobia buffet the family emotionally and physically. Grattan is a graceful writer and keen observer of family dynamics; the domestic themes, realist style, and emphasis on German culture can’t help but recall Jonathan Franzen. But the energy Grattan expends on characterization doesn’t quite extend to the plot, which feels shapeless despite some dramatic flare-ups. The lassitude is somewhat intentional, though: When you’re as disoriented as this clan is, Grattan suggests, there truly is no place like home.
An ambitious, artful, and winding tale of a family in search of its moorings.
Angela Dawe is an outstanding narrator for this expansive audiobook. Spanning three generations, the story begins with 12-year-old Beate's move from East Germany to the U.S. in 1968. As Beate grows up and has her own family, Dawe maintains a powerful performance, infusing this engrossing story with sincerity and energy. Whether Dawe is savoring some of the observant details of the narrative or creating conversations with nuanced tones and accents, the story comes to life early and stays vivid all the way through. Even in the novel's slower moments, Dawe's voice is strong, and her pace is excellent. As a good narrator will do, she lets the story shine with patient grace and confident kindness. This audiobook is definitely worth a listen. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Angela Dawe is an outstanding narrator for this expansive audiobook. Spanning three generations, the story begins with 12-year-old Beate's move from East Germany to the U.S. in 1968. As Beate grows up and has her own family, Dawe maintains a powerful performance, infusing this engrossing story with sincerity and energy. Whether Dawe is savoring some of the observant details of the narrative or creating conversations with nuanced tones and accents, the story comes to life early and stays vivid all the way through. Even in the novel's slower moments, Dawe's voice is strong, and her pace is excellent. As a good narrator will do, she lets the story shine with patient grace and confident kindness. This audiobook is definitely worth a listen. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
