by Eva Menasse
First published 2021
The year is 1989, and the small border town of Darkenbloom sits between Austria and Hungary like a place frozen in time. The older residents claim they remember nothing about the war. The younger ones plan their escape. When thousands of East German refugees gather at the border, the past seems ready to break through the town's carefully maintained silence. Then a stranger appears, asking the questions no one wants to answer. Anonymous threatening letters begin arriving in mailboxes. People start vanishing. When someone turns up dead, the town's web of secrets begins to unravel. Exiled nobility, former Nazis who became Soviet enforcers, hidden marriages, and graves marked with the wrong names all emerge from decades of deliberate forgetting. The townspeople discover that silence, meant to protect them, has become their most dangerous enemy.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, suspenseful, tense, thought-provoking
Tropes: mystery-investigation, secrets-unraveling, stranger-in-town, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Darkenbloom, Austria, Hungary, East Germany
Period: 1989, Cold War era, Post-World War II
480 pages · Paperback · Scribe US
Content warnings: death, murder, war