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Siblings

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

1960. The border between East and West Germany has closed.

For Elisabeth - a young painter - the GDR is her generation's chance to build a glorious, egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the ever-wider chasm of the party line; over them loom the twin spectres of opportunity and fear, and the shadow of their defector brother Konrad. In prose as bold as a scarlet paint stroke, Brigitte Reimann battles with the clash of idealism and suppression, familial loyalty and desire. The result is this ground-breaking classic of post-war East German literature.

©2023 Brigitte Reimann and Lucy Jones (P)2023 Penguin Audio Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Political World Literature War Socialism

Critic reviews

"It is hard to believe that this brilliant novel has taken so many years to find its way into English translation. Spare, chilling, with wild flashes of vivid colour and the tempo of a thriller, Siblings jolts us into the beating heart of a family and post-war East Germany, conjuring the political dreams and divisions that make and ultimately break both." (Lisa Appignanesi)
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An interesting tale about the love ties between a brother and sister, and yet they are in opposite camps about whether they can live, survive and thrive in Berlin’s East zone or whether one of them must escape to West Germany in order to survive. Intensely written and insightful into a difficult unique political ideological situation imposed on ordinary people in early 1960s Berlin, after the war has been built.

Complicated yet fascinating

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