Broken Glass Park: A Novel

Alina Bronsky

Mar 2010 · Europa Editions

About this ebook

In this “riveting debut” a Russian teenager living in Berlin dreams of taking revenge on the man who killed her mother—“A stark, moving tale of resiliency” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

A finalist for the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize

Now an award-winning motion picture

Seventeen-year-old Sascha Naimann was born in Moscow, but now lives in Berlin with her two younger siblings. She is precocious, independent, streetwise, and ever since her stepfather Vadim murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her peers, Sascha doesn’t dream of escaping the grim housing project where they live. Sascha’s dreams of writing a novel about her beautiful but naïve mother . . . and of taking Vadim’s life.

In a voice that is candid and self-confident, by turns childlike and mature, Sascha relates the internal struggle between those forces that can destroy us, and those that lead us out of sorrow and back to life. Broken Glass Park goes straight to the heart of what it means to be young, alive, and conscious in these first decades of the new millenium.

“A gripping portrayal of life on the margins of society.” —Freundin magazine (Germany)

About the author

Russian-born Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010); The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publisher's Weekly; and Just Call Me Superhero (Europa, 2014). Tim Mohr spent the 1990s as a club DJ in Berlin and much of the next decade as a staff editor at Playboy magazine. He is the translator of Guantanamo, by Dorothea Dieckmann, which won the Three Percent award for best translation of 2007, and Wetlands, by Charlotte Roche. He is currently at work on his own book, a history of the punk music scene in East Germany.