The Recent East

One of O, the Oprah Magazine and Refinery29's Most Anticipated Books of 2021"I fell in love with The Recent East, which is absolutely spellbinding. Thomas Grattan's writing on family, displacement, and queerness is so well wrought, intimate, and mesmerizing. This is an exquisite and profound novel. I will be pushing it in the hands of everyone I know." —Etaf Rum, author of A Woman is No ManAn extraordinary family saga following a mother and two teens as they navigate a new life in East GermanyShortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate Haas, who defected from East Germany as a child, is notified that her parents' abandoned mansion is available for her to reclaim. Newly divorced and eager to escape her bleak life in upstate New York, where she moved as an adult, she arrives with her two teenagers to discover a city that has become an unrecognizable ghost town. The move fractures the siblings' close...