Silence

One country, two families, one hundred years of history: Reinhard Jirgl's novel Broken Silence is the monumental epic of a century of terror and violence. The novel begins with a photograph album including pictures that go back more than eighty years – a hundred images of two families, one from East Prussia, the other from Brandenburg. They survived two world wars, spiralling inflation and enforced migration, sharing the experience of living through five different political systems from the era of Imperial Germany to the present day. Inspired by the photographs, Jirgl's epic tells stories of love, betrayal and psychological injury from a variety of narrative perspectives and differing eras. He tells us of a gambler who drives his family into debt and ultimately to their deaths, and of the catastrophic love between a brother and sister – these are people who refuse to be satisfied with the disappointing cards life has dealt them. »This is writing of the highest order, providing a forcefully rebellious slap in the face of prevailing literary fashions,« wrote Helmut Böttiger in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Silence confirms Reinhard Jirgl's reputation as a writer of extraordinary skill.