Upheaval

• SPIEGEL Bestseller
• Chamisso Prize 2022 
• Rheingau Literature Prize 2022
• Shortlisted for the Grand Continent Prize 2022
• Nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2022
• English sample translation available online

Four women from four generations, one communal apartment, and the end of an era

This is a story of change: in the vast Siberian expanse, one thousand versts east of Moscow, a grandmother, mother, daughter, and granddaughter live together in one room of a communal apartment, beneath crumbling plaster that hearkens back to bygone days. It is March 11, 1985, and the world is at a historical turning-point that no one can yet anticipate. The engineer next door continues to sort his life into little boxes; Varvara helps deliver a baby; Maria dreams of love; and Janka sings in the kitchen at night.

Upheaval is a powerful novel about four lives on a turning-point, a lost world whose tremors we can still feel today, and the absurdity of life and its great question: “How should we live?”

In this incisive chronicle of our time, Katerina Poladjan shows once again that German literature is, above all, European literature. Music of the Future is a timeless novel replete with tender humor that turns to the age-old, yet ever-pressing question of how we should live.

"One could say that [Katerina Poladjan] has written the 'book of the hour' that must be read now, in the face of Russian Great Power fantasies." - Der SPIEGEL, Xaver von Cranach

"Katerina Poladjan has written one of the very great contemporary German novels, which is read differently now in times of war than it was in times of peace." — ARD, Denis Scheck

“Upheaval is the quintessence of a novel: as powerful and beautiful and clear as thirty novels.” — Monika Rinck