Cover of The End of Days

The End of Days

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there....

Read more

A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Daysoffers a unique overview of the twentieth century.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 320 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The End of Days? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The End of Days. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. After Midnight Shares fiction, Germany, german
  2. Little Man, What Now? Shares german, fiction, Germany
  3. And Where Were You, Adam? Shares german, fiction, german literature
  4. In Times of Fading Light Shares Germany, historical fiction, german literature

“People who read The End of Days tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Sleep of the Righteous
  2. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman
  3. Roads to Berlin
  4. The Brothers

“If you want more of the same (historical fiction about jewish), start with these.”

  1. Homecoming
  2. Crabwalk
  3. Patterns of Childhood
  4. Shadows in Paradise

“If it was the german that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Blood Brothers
  2. Austerlitz
  3. The Emigrants
  4. Wolf Among Wolves

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Ways of Going Home
  2. The Unnamable
  3. Notes from Underground
  4. Here's to You, Jesusa!