Jenny Erpenbeck Books in Order

A novella and four stories enter the lives of women who exist at society’s edges. Spare narratives move beyond ordinary realism, exploring isolation, eccentricity and the small possibilities of hope within unsettling, sometimes mystical experiences.

One unnamed woman lives through five possible stories, each ending in a different death. Moving from the Habsburg Empire through twentieth-century upheavals, the novel explores how chance and historical forces redirect a life that might have unfolded otherwise.

Retired Berlin professor Richard notices African refugees protesting and begins visiting their shelter. Listening to their stories transforms his quiet widowhood, drawing him into struggles over asylum and forcing him to reconsider belonging, privilege and his own country’s history.

Jenny Erpenbeck reflects on growing up in East Berlin, the collapse of the GDR and her path through theater to writing. Personal essays connect memory and literary influences with questions of history, silence, displacement and contemporary political life.

In late-1980s East Berlin, nineteen-year-old Katharina begins an affair with Hans, a married writer decades older. Their passionate, troubled relationship unfolds alongside the collapse of the GDR, as private expectations and public certainties give way to an unfamiliar future.

Brief interconnected prose pieces explore disappearance, from misplaced everyday objects to lost friends and vanished East German landmarks. Jenny Erpenbeck considers how memory preserves what the world removes, tracing the relationship between personal experience, historical change and absence.

A house beside a Brandenburg lake connects the lives of twelve people across a century of German history. Their stories move through public upheaval and private experience, tracing changing ownership, attachment, memory, and loss within one enduring landscape.