The Giraffe's Neck cover art

The Giraffe's Neck

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The Giraffe's Neck

By: Judith Schalansky
Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown
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About this listen

Adaptation is everything. Inge Lohmark is well aware of that; after all, she's been teaching biology for more than 30 years. But nothing will change the fact that her school is going to be closed in four years: in this dwindling town in the eastern German countryside, there are fewer and fewer children. Inge's husband, who was a cattle inseminator before the reunification, is now breeding ostriches. Their daughter, Claudia, emigrated to the U.S. years ago and has no intention of having children. Everyone is resisting the course of nature that Inge teaches every day in class.

When Inge finds herself experiencing intense feelings for a 9th-grade girl, her biologically determined worldview is shaken. And in increasingly outlandish ways, she tries to save what can no longer be saved.

©2014 First published in Great Britain 2014. Copyright 2011 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. English translation copyright 2014 by Shaun Whiteside. (P)2014 Audible Inc. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction

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Struggled to become engaged with fairly loose consciousness flow narrative, possibly largely due to German accents put on by British English narrator. I think it's worth a read next for some strong passages of a more philosophical nature interpersed in too much descriptive detail of individuals who are otherwise irrelevant to the non- plot.

Her islands were more engaging.

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