Broken Ground

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What to expect

Kaethe Shalk faces a new life of boundless complexity when the Berlin Wall comes down and the ruin of the East stands in stark contrast to the exuberance of the West.

Having lived in America for many years, Kaethe Shalk returns to Berlin to try to come to terms with the Berlin of her youth. Her journey from America to the broken ground of contemporary Germany becomes an act of recovery: of the lives intertwined by politics and passion, of memory and the invented self, and of Kaethe’s search for a daughter lost to her, now grown and living in isolation from her mother’s past and present, somewhere in vast, resurgent Berlin.

Critics Review

  • “An elegant, intricate, and deeply satisfying novel.”

    Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

  • “Kai Maristed’s lucid psychological portraits connect us to familiar characters and unsettling places across continents and time warps. Her story leads us into a history of loves and betrayals to discover the mysteries at the shifting edges of people’s lives. Her lyric writing is charged with dead cold realism. Maristed is a fearless guide into the secret country of the self.”

    Maria Flook, New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Eden

  • “Emotionally engaging for adults and mature young people, who will empathize with a woman who struggles with the baggage of a painful past. Ward reads with a trained, melodious voice paced with precision and provides a good handling of German words and phrases.”

    Kliatt

  • “Johanna Ward narrates with sensitivity to Kaethe’s nervous energy and anxieties. Ward’s pace reflects the impatience of a mother who feels she has already missed too much and must act with dispatch to recover what she can of the past, but who finds it all fundamentally overwhelming.”

    AudioFile

  • “Abounding in idealism, lust, betrayal, and re-emerging hope, this compelling portrait of a person whose life has been swept up in both the personal and the political realities of the Cold War is an eye-opener.”

    Library Journal

  • “The prose is stupendous as Maristed’s entangled layers of plot allow a look at modern Berlin through the eyes of its turbulent past.”

    Booklist

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