Siblings

“There is something intoxicating about Reimann’s dense, jagged prose. It conveys hunger for a life that encompasses idealism with desire, the person with the cause, the self with the siblings, and the present with the past, all united by the force of personality.”—The Guardian

“The spirited English-language debut from Reimann (1933–1973) chronicles young love, idealism, and disillusionment in 1960s East Germany.”—Publishers Weekly

“In this 1963 novel by award-winning East German author Reimann, family love is tested by idealism and ideology in a divided Germany… Reimann’s work brings a historical moment convincingly to life.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Reimann was interested in the ‘I’ of the self at a time when the collective ‘we’ dominated—and the tension runs through Siblings...It makes her work feel modern, especially in an age of social media-fuelled self-revelation.”—The Sunday Times

“I’ve never read a book similar to [Brigitte Reimann’s I Have No Regrets] in my entire life, revealing a mixture of shyness, fragility, passion and boldness. It mounts to almost a literary lesson on how the most fragile are entitled to live life to the fullest.”—Adania Shibli, author of Minor Detail

“Her work deserves a much wider reading public outside Germany, where she remains best known for her ambiguously autobiographical final novel Franziska Linkerhand...The eight years of irregular diary entries that make up I Have No Regrets, edited in German by Angela Drescher and now translated into English by Lucy Jones, are a welcome introduction to Reimann’s work.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Reimann left behind a string of novels and several years’ worth of diaries that shed vivid light on life in East Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s.”—Charlie Connelly, The New European