1.000 Coils of Fear

• Nominated for the German Book Prize 2020
• Nominated for the "aspekte"-Literature Prize 2020 for the best German-language debut
• City of Fulda Prize for the best German-language debut
• Selected by New Books in German 
• Full English translation available

A young woman attends a play about the fall of the Berlin Wall – and realizes she is the only Black person in the audience. She and her boyfriend are hanging out by a lake outside Berlin – and four neo-Nazis show up.

In New York, she is having sex with a stranger on the night of the 2016 presidential election – and wakes up to panicked texts from her friends in Germany about Donald Trump’s unlikely victory.

Engaging in a witty Q&A with herself – or is it her alter ego? – she takes stock of our rapidly changing times, sometimes angry, sometimes amused, sometimes afraid, and always passionate. And she tells the story of her family: her mother, a punk in former East Germany who never had the freedom she dreamed of. Her Angolan father, who returned to his home country before she was born to start a second family. Her grandmother, whose life of obedience to party principles brought her prosperity and security but not happiness. And her twin brother, who took his own life at the age of nineteen.

Heart-rending, opinionated, and wry, Olivia Wenzel’s remarkable debut novel is a clear-sighted and polyphonic investigation into where we’re from and where we’re going, what it really means to be the odd one out, what it really means to belong and what price wanting to belong can exact.