Star 111, Lutz Seiler
And Other Stories, UK, September 2023
New York Review Books, US, October 1, 2024
Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize
Longlisted for the 2022 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
Shortlisted for the 2022 Prix Femina étranger
#1 on the Spiegel Bestseller List
November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they’ve harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father’s car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it’s with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all of poetry.
Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.
Praise for Star 111
'This gorgeous [novel] offers an intimate view of a German family’s reckoning with the end of the Cold War.... It’s an exceptional story of fresh starts.' PW
'A powerfully imagined novel of the new Germany...' Kirkus
‘[Seiler’s] playful language and knack for imagery light up “Star 111” as it unfolds through the beautifully captured events of everyday life. Translator Tess Lewis has done remarkable work rendering the book in language that does credit to Seiler’s poetic sensibilities and sense of rhythm.’ Washington Post
‘The author’s shimmering, ironic and musical prose—impeccably translated by Tess Lewis—captures a moment both archaic and profoundly real. Utopian and matter-of-fact, it is both timeless and obsessed with the minutiae of its time.’ Karen Leeder, TLS
‘A rich, vivid tale about new beginnings and fractured utopias.’ Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times, ‘Best books of 2023 — Fiction in translation’
Gary Perry from Foyles Charing Cross Road, London’s Best Books of 2023
‘There aren’t many books that can be cited as the missing link between Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and still fewer that could live up to the comparison, but Lutz Seiler (with impeccable assistance from Tess Lewis) makes it look easy. Star 111 is a brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun. A stellar achievement.’ Will Ashon
[Kruso] was a substantial novel in every sense, and was followed in 2020 by an equally weighty companion volume, Star 111, now given an American translation, as was its predecessor, by Tess Lewis. Hong Kong Review
It took Lutz Seiler, born in East Germany, thirty years to give to the moment [of the Fall of the Berlin Wall] the full richness of fertile and ambiguous human experience. With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the “Wenderoman” par excellence, the great novel of the “turn”, as German reunification is called.’ Le Mondes des Livres
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