Hunger Angel

'I know you'll return'. These are his grandmother's last words to him. He has them in his head as he boards the truck at 3am on a freezing mid-January morning in 1945. They keep him company during the long journey to Russia. They keep him alive - through hunger, pain, and despair - during his time in the brutal Soviet labour camps. And, eventually, they bring him back home. But when he does return, he finds that an embarrassed, traumatised silence hangs over his harrowing experiences. Even with his two friends, fellow Romanian-Germans who survived the camps with him, the memories that have branded them so indelibly seem impossible to put into words. This is the major new novel from one of the most important international writers, writing at the height of her creative abilities. ‘Herta won Nobel Prize, as the jury said, "for her honesty in describing the world of the dispossessed". It is much more than that. Her style is not "honest", it is simply brilliant, it is pure poetry. Her aspiration to purity, moral included, is like an inner sword, it's as if she had a a sword instead of a spine, as in one of Kafka's dreams. Her answers to the beauty and horror of this world are either yes, yes or no, no, like the Gospel parable. Nothing in between, no compromise between an obsessive revulsion for the opressors and an obsessive compassion for their victims.’ Mircea Cartarescu, Frankfurter Rundschau

This is a remarkable novel, both bleak and chastening. The detail is extraordinary. --Guardian

Müller's limpid narrative creates an extraordinary sense of intimacy and communion with the reader. --Telegraph