Skip to main navigation Skip to main content
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King has won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature!!!  Buy now
Book Title

In Times of Fading Light

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Eugen Ruge; Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Body
“An important, highly accomplished debut novel. . . .  [In Times of Fading Light] is aptly named, for the reading feels as if we are working our way through a photograph album—vignettes about various members of this family—as the light in their lives grows dimmer. . . . To write the history of a country through the prism of a family is an enormous task, but Ruge has cut it up and somehow put the pieces together in a way that at first may seem confusing but later makes perfect sense. . . .  This splendid, beautifully translated novel becomes richer as it acquires a logic of its own.”­—The Boston Globe
 
“Powerful . . . Ruge has managed to weave the person into the political in a book that functions as an ethnography of a lost time as much as it does a novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Share Title

List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-679-8
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
344
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, the paperback edition of the internationally best-selling portrait of an East German family

About the Author

Eugen  Ruge
Credit: Tobias Bohm
In 2011, Eugen Ruge, author of Cabo de Gata, came to international acclaim when he won the German Book Prize for In Times of Fading Light, his debut novel, which went on to be translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Berlin.
More by author
Anthea Bell is a freelance translator from German and French and the translator of Cabo de Gata and In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge. Her translations include works of fiction and general nonfiction, books for young people, and classics by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She has won a number of translation awards in the United Kingdom and the United States.
More by author

Praise

  • “After reading and rereading we realize how carefully Ruge has placed each part of the puzzle; this splendid, beautifully translated novel becomes richer as it acquires a logic of its own.”The Boston Globe
     
  • “Impressive. . . . Ruge has managed to weave the personal into the political in a book that functions as an ethnography of a lost time as much as it does a novel.”San Francisco Chronicle
     
  • “A shrewd and very knowing novel, slippery with the truth and packed tight with compressed tension, and written by a talented new voice.”Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Back to Table of Contents