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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

MISCHLING

Affinity Konar

The lyricism and historical sweep of All the Light We Cannot See meet the psychological intensity of Room in this spellbinding story of survival and resilience about twin sisters facing the ultimate Nazi evil.

Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past.
Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad.

It's the fall of 1944 when the twin sisters are sent to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, twelve-year-old Pearl and Stasha Zamorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood.
As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.

That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks—a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin—travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated equally by danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. Their hearts mapped with longing, the young survivors discover what has become of the world, and try to imagine a future within it.
A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, MISCHLING defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope.

Affinity Konar is the author of THE ILLUSTRATED VERSION OF THINGS, which was published in 2009 by Fiction Collective. Ben Marcus called it "a literary debut of phenomenal innovation and power." Lydia Millet resembled Konar with Samuel Beckett and says that the novel is "sonorous, brilliant, and at least half insane; its word substitutions and trickery are both charming and maddening, reminding us of the thoughts we almost but never quite had." Affinity has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University where she was classmates with Karen Russell and Rivka Galchen.

MISCHLING
Deutsch von Barbara Schaden
[HC Hanser 07/17; PB 01/19]
Available products
Book

Published 2016-09-01 by Little, Brown (US)

Comments

Canada: Knopf; Danish: Gad Forlag (pre-empt); Hungarian: Libri (pre-empt); Israel: Kinneret; Dutch: Signatuur (auction); Italian: Longanesi (pre-empt); Spain: Galaxia Gutenberg; Spanish (Latin America and US): Oceano; Turkish: Pegasus; Czech: Euromedia; Polish: Proszynski Media; Portuguese: Bertrand; Serbian: Laguna; Slovak: Ikar; Chinese: Sunshine Media; Russian: Azbooka-Atticus;

Finland: WSOY

Affinity Konar's MISCHLING is a tale of courage, courageously told—spare and beautiful, riveting and heartrending. Half of me wanted to linger over every page, the other half insisted I race ahead. It's a case of extraordinary storytelling from first page to transcendent last. —David Wroblewski

Affinity Konar has invented a language. It's sonorous, brilliant...like Samuel Beckett, this is literature for the superhuman: reading it makes us greater than we are. —Lydia Millet