About the author ...  Kai Maristed studied economics and political science at the University of Munich and MIT. She has worked in journalism and drama in Germany, as a business consultant, as CFO of a rural hospital in Haiti, and on the faculties of Harvard, Emerson College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Publications include the novels Broken Ground (2005) , Fall (1996) and Out After Dark (1993), and a collection of stories, Belong to Me (1997), along with short stories and essays in The American Scholar, Ascent, The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, Zoetrope, The American Voice, The Boston Globe, and the Anchor Essays Annual. She is a frequent reviewer for The Los Angeles Times. Kai lives in Paris and on Cape Cod. |
"I have read [Broken Ground] with the greatest admiration. It seems to me extraordinary... a significant contribution to the literature of contemporary Germany." John Coetzee  Broken GroundHardcover: 320 pages ; Shoemaker & Hoard; (October 2003); ISBN: 1593760051 BOOKLIST Review: Kaethe Schalk was born out of a love affair between an American soldier turned communist sympathizer and a German refugee. Raised by her grandparents, she eventually reunited with her father, a rising bureaucrat in East Germany, and she, too, joined the cause. Upon her later defection to West Berlin, she married into an old but impoverished aristocratic family. As she observed the turmoil of postwar German partition, the protests of the 1960s, the building of the Berlin wall and its eventual destruction, and German unification, she also attempted to raise a family. Now, living an isolated life on the New England farm of her girlhood, she returns to Berlin to seek her daughter, who has gone missing. While she roams, astonished, through the dark underbelly of a newly whole and prosperous Berlin, she is also haunted by her own history. The prose is stupendous as Maristed's entangled layers of plot allow a look at modern Berlin through the eyes of its turbulent past. Michael Spinella Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
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