“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