Broken Glass Park
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In this “riveting debut” a Russian teenager living in Berlin dreams of taking revenge on the man who killed her mother—“A stark, moving tale of resiliency” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
A finalist for the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
Now an award-winning motion picture
Seventeen-year-old Sascha Naimann was born in Moscow, but now lives in Berlin with her two younger siblings. She is precocious, independent, streetwise, and ever since her stepfather Vadim murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her peers, Sascha doesn’t dream of escaping the grim housing project where they live. Sascha’s dreams of writing a novel about her beautiful but naïve mother . . . and of taking Vadim’s life.
In a voice that is candid and self-confident, by turns childlike and mature, Sascha relates the internal struggle between those forces that can destroy us, and those that lead us out of sorrow and back to life. Broken Glass Park goes straight to the heart of what it means to be young, alive, and conscious in these first decades of the new millenium.
“A gripping portrayal of life on the margins of society.” —Freundin magazine (Germany)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her riveting debut, Bronsky gives us Sascha Naimann, a 17-year-old Russian immigrant living in Germany who narrates a brutal story with a sharp, canny voice. Sascha is determined to kill her stepfather, Vadim, who murdered her mother, but with Vadim in prison and social workers hovering, Vadim's cousin, Maria, arrives to care for Sascha and her younger stepsiblings. A puff piece in the local paper about Vadim's supposed reformation sends a livid Sascha to the newspaper office, where she meets Volker Trebur, an editor who, having briefly known Sascha's mother, offers to make things right. Sascha quickly takes him up on the offer, moving in to Volker's guestroom and beginning an intense involvement with Volker's family particularly his teenage son. When that flames out, Sascha ends up in broken glass park, the dangerous area in her neighborhood where drugs, booze, and rough sex prevail. Sascha's hunger for life shines through her relentless fight to leave behind a painful childhood a struggle complicated by an unexpected twist in the final act making for a stark, moving tale of resiliency and survival.
