Dancing at the End of the World
A masterful portrait of a frayed, protean city held together by loss and hope."
— Peter Mann, author of World Pacific and The Torqued Man
A haunting novel of war and the devastating legacy it refuses to relinquish.
— Weina Dai Randel, the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Master Jeweler
Dancing at the End of the World is a sprawling collection of connected stories and lives that span almost a century of Berlin’s rich and complicated history. Beginning in 1933 amidst the rumblings of fascism and the demise of the Weimar Republic, and concluding in the fraught social and political climate of the present day, the collection weaves seamlessly through the defining years of the iconic city.
The collection’s cast of characters is wide: Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and Syrian refugees in the twenty-first century; Holocaust survivors and battle-hardened Cold War Berliners; tech entrepreneurs and expats drawn by the city’s cheap hedonism. All are bruised by life, and by history, and all connect to a central figure, Klara von Arnsberg, the daughter of a famed Weimar industrialist, whose instinct for survival and ability to shape-shift through the years mirrors that of Berlin itself.