Our book club welcomes people from all round the world for a discussion about a work of fiction which has recently been translated into English. We meet on Zoom each month during Trinity's term time. Admission is free, and participants may join as and when it suits. In November, we will be discussing:

The Village on the Edge of the World

by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Kate McNaughton. 

Superb... Müller articulates well the pain and anxiety she suffered as an enemy of the state. It's heartening to learn how she regained her strength and found ways, however small, to stand up to the Securitate

Telegraph

A clinical and piercing reflection on life under tyranny, on the compromises that so many have to make, on choices and consequences... Heart-stopping

Financial Times

The Village on the Edge of the World is a rare document that shows just how much darkness can go into prose as luminous as that of Müller

TLS

From her childhood in Romania, in a village ‘as small as a thimble on the edge of the world’, through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller’s story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory and trauma, and on what it was to live and write during Ceausescu’s regime: on the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; on the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century – and how they remain with us in the twenty-first.

Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Banat, Romania. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel and The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, among other works. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

Kate McNaughton was born and raised in Paris and now lives in Berlin. She read English and European Literature at Cambridge and filmmaking at the European Film College in Denmark. As well as a writer, she is also a documentary maker and translator.

If you enjoy events about literary translation, take a look at what else we have planned at the Centre, here.