• ISBN13: 9781803092287
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: Creative Writing, Fiction
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publisher Imprint: Seagull Books
• Publication Date: October 16, 2022
• Pages: 332
• Original Price: 699.0 INR
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 420 grams

Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women—seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna’s daughter Anna—are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutes—the “wild expulsions” of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna? Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimat—homeland—is both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Anna’s son. A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirgl’s unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium.

Reinhard Jirgl was born in Berlin in 1953 and is the author of numerous novels that were censored by the GDR but published after the border between East and West Germany opened in 1989. Iain Galbraith’s volume of poetry The True Height of the Ear was published by Arc in 2018. He has won numerous prizes for his translations, including the Stephen Spender Prize, the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize.