“A gripping story of two sisters struggling to forget an unspeakable horror in postwar Berlin, a loveless city where survival, love, and lust intertwine with painful intricacy.”—Weina Dai Randel, the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Master Jeweler
Dancing at the End of the World is a sprawling, century-spanning collection of interconnected stories that traces Berlin’s turbulent history through the lives of its inhabitants, integrating survival, reinvention, and the echoes of trauma with lyrical prose and unforgettable characters.
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.
From the first story, we are introduced to Klara von Arnsberg, the aristocratic daughter of a famed industrialist, whose fierce instinct for both survival and reinvention is a mirror for that of Berlin itself. The life—or rather, many lives—that Klara builds for herself over the decades to come, are ever entangled with the fate of the city as we bear witness to the Holocaust, the post-war years, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ensuing years of dramatic transformation.
As we move through the decades of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Klara is ever-present in the stories and the characters we encounter: Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and Syrian refugees in the twenty-first century, frustrated housewives in the new Berlin of money and rampant gentrification, Cold War Berliners hardened by unimaginable cruelty, expats in search of themselves, tech entrepreneurs who dream of immortality, and the lost children of the cultural revolution. All are linked to Klara, to her desires and fears, her greatest love, and the ultimate fate of both her legacy and the country itself.