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Matthias Jügler, Die Verlassenen
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I really loathe seeing videos of myself, but this book needs to have a wider audience so here I am: it's a subdued but gripping, unputdownable tale of a fractured childhood and the long-term effect a regime can have on its people.

Synopsis
One morning in 1986 in Halle, East Germany, a mother takes her five-year-old son to pre-school. They chat and make plans for the summer. The mother hugs the boy and watches as he goes off to the other children. They will never see each other again. The son will only find out how she died when he is an adult. But Johannes Wagner will remember this last moment clearly, even 30 years later.

When his mother dies, his father, Thomas Wagner, is only able to offer his son limited comfort. His questions remain unanswered. His father disappears in 1994; Johannes goes to live with his grandmother. He isn’t given any answers to the questions about his father either.

Johannes is married and soon to become a father himself when he finds out the truth. In one of his father’s books, he finds a letter addressed to Thomas Wagner, sent from Norway in May 1994, shortly before his disappearance. Johannes travels to Norway and meets a woman who passes on the facts to him.

What Johannes thinks of as his memories are now seen in a different light. His parents, who were involved in resistance campaigns, were spied on by the Stasi. One of the informants was Wolfgang Köhler, with whom Johannes’ father had become close, believing him to be a good friend. Johannes himself has happy childhood memories of Wolfgang. But he now finds out that Wolfgang was an accomplice in his mother’s death, and was responsible for the disappearance of his father’s precious manuscripts. In 1992 Wolfgang moved to Norway to build a new life for himself.

Johannes struggles with the emotion that this new-found information stirs up, and he must work through his hatred of the man who destroyed his parents’ lives. When he tracks him down in Norway, he will have a chance to destroy Wolfgang’s life himself. There is a wonderful twist to the showdown on the final page.

This is a story of the long-term effects of the East German regime on its inhabitants, even today. The title, The Forsaken, is deliberately ambiguous: this is not a single case. But for those who aren’t interested in recent German history, this is also a story that anyone with empathy will warm to immensely, it has a thought-provoking theme of memory, and it has a certain unputdownable thriller aspect as well.

‘Sentences are precise and powerful – Matthias Jügler’s novel Die Verlassenen is a masterpiece in brevity.’ Berliner Zeitung / Frankfurter Rundschau, Ulrich Seidler

‘Die Verlassenen is a gripping novel, clearly and sensitively written.’ NDR 1 Radio MV, Melanie Last

Author Bio
Matthias Jügler was born in 1984, did a degree in Slavonic and history of art in Greifswald and Oslo and studied creative writing at the Institute of Literature in Leipzig. His 2015 debut novel, Raubfischen, was awarded numerous prizes. Jügler has been writer-in-residence in Pfaffenhofen and at the Goethe-Institut in Uzbekistan, and was awarded a scholarship by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. He lives in Leipzig with his wife and children, and is a freelance editor.

Translator Bio
Jo Heinrich is a German and French to English translator and is currently working on her first full-length literary translation of Marzahn Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp for Peirene Press, due to be published in February 2022. info@joheinrichtranslation.co.uk or @groveregg on Twitter.

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