Product details
- ISBN 9781914495229
- Weight: 880g
- Dimensions: 158 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 02 May 2024
- Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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'Like Olga Tokarczuk, Šnajder has written a novel about a Europe that has lost its diversity and has been
destroyed by fascism, communism and, in recent times, nationalism ... a modern epic' Le Monde
'A masterpiece' La Repubblica
The very next day processions of young men, some still children, began to move around the little town of Nuštar, with drums providing a steady rhythm ... These young men came from German families, Germans living outside the Reich, Volksdeutsche. Some stayed in their houses, some were shut up in the storeroom by their mothers, but as time went on more and more of them followed the drumming ...
1769. A hungry year in Germany. Kempf the ancestor departs his homeland with his compatriots in search of a brighter future. Years pass and generations of Germans make Slavonia their home. But in 1940, when Europe is at war once more, this minority, the Volksdeutsch, are called to fight for the Reich, for a land now foreign to them.
Among their ranks is Georg Kempf, the narrator's father. Forcibly conscripted into the Waffen SS, he deserts, aware of the danger that this involves. At the end of the war, he falls in love with a committed partisan called Vera despite the unimaginable: if they had met earlier, each one would have had to kill the other.
The Brass Age, Slobodan Šnajder's masterpiece, is both a family saga and a powerful historical novel about the destiny of those shackled by history, and the generations doomed to inherit the contradictory fates of their forebears. Šnajder looks to his own biography to capture two hundred years of conflict and dividing ideology. In the process, he reconstructs a world that fell apart.
Slobodan Šnajder graduated with a Philosophy and English degree at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. He is a writer, publicist, playwright and has also worked as a columnist for several newspapers. Šnajder published his first full-length novel Morendo in 2012 and The Brass Age has won numerous awards including the Meša Selimovic Award and the Mirko Kovaè Award.
Celia Hawkesworth translates from the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Among her translations are works by Dubravka Ugrešic and Nobel Prize Winner Ivo Andric. Her translation of Daša Drndic's Belladonna was a finalist for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize and her translation of E.E.G. by Drndic won the American Best Translation Award.
