Invitation to the Bold of Heart

Dorothee Elmiger

Translated by Katy Derbyshire

 

5 x 8 inches, 152pp. December 2011

ISBN : 9780857420190

Rs  425.00 (HB)
$21.00 (HB)
£13.50 (HB)

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A fire broke out in the coal seams of their town years ago, and the flames are still smouldering underground. Margaret and Fritzi, the two sisters who are the heroines of Invitation to the Bold of Heart, the debut novel by Swiss writer Dorothee Elmiger, are the last remaining youth of this vanishing town. Their inheritance is nothing but an abandoned swath of land ruled by devastation. But the sisters won’t accept this state of affairs—they set out on an expedition, determined to piece together the fragments of their family history. Only by learning their own story can they look to the future with hope. When they rediscover a long-forgotten river, Margaret and Fritzi can sense a new life ahead.

Invitation to the Bold of Heart is a startling dystopian tale of hope and exploration and a testament to the timeless need of youth to rebel against authority.

 

Dorothee Elmiger is a Berlin-based Swiss writer. This, her first novel, won her the Aspekte Prize and the Lauris Literature Prize, among others.

 

Katy Derbyshire co-edits www.no-mans-land.org, an online magazine of contemporary German writing in English, and co-hosts a monthly translation lab in Berlin. She has translated books by Helene Hegemann, Clemens Meyer, Inka Parei (Shadow-Boxing Woman and What Darkness Was for Seagull Books), Simon Urban, Dorothee Elmiger (Invitation to the Bold of Heart for Seagull Books) and Sibylle Lewitscharoff (Apostoloff, forthcoming from Seagull Books).

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