Sheep Die Quietly

What ties us to those who came before us?

In stark, stunningly beautiful language, the narrator Alma tells the story of her family over a century, starting in a small village in northern Germany at the end of the German empire, and moving through the first and second world wars and up to present-day Vienna.

Interlaced with surreal, magical details - a boy who is born asleep and doesn't wake up until he's a young man, an undertaker's lemon tree that bears fruit all year, and a midwife who never seems to age - the novel describes lives shaped by the rhythms and patterns of the earth and the rich, complex emotional inheritance that generations visit on one another.

Rich in restrained emotion - and as deeply moving as it is brutally unsentimental - as full of wonder as it is horror, this is an unforgettable debut novel.