Higher Ground
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed ...
Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family.
After Resi’s latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatisation and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her.
Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling’s novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin. Resi is part of a group of friends she's known since childhood. She is the poor one among them, and while all were leftists when they were younger, her friends have since found comfort and stability, and fail to acknowledge the class difference between themselves and Resi. Her friends all own apartments in a glitzy new co-op building, for instance, while Resi and her family sublet a cheap, decrepit flat nearby from her old friends Vera and Frank. After Resi publishes an essay about what it's like to live in a "building without a name," followed by a successful book, she's served with an eviction notice and loses her friends, who can't stomach Resi's class critiques. Stelling frames the narrative as a long letter to Resi's oldest child, Bea, in which Resi details her difficult childhood, her mother's life, and the hypocrisy behind her privileged friends' notion of self-determination. A wry warning to Bea on the first page—"Families are a hotbed of neuroses, and the ruler of this particular hotbed, our nest, is me"—suggests Resi's version is open to interpretation. This biting class critique is hard to turn away from.
