The recent east

Grattan's striking and surprising debut traces the parallel fates of a town in the former East Germany and a mother and her two children who struggle to make it their home. Beate Haas's parents defected from East Germany with the 12-year-old Beate, settling in upstate New York. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate receives the unexpected news that she's inherited her family's home in Kritzhagen, Germany. Recently divorced, Beate decides to move there along with her children, 13-year-old Michael and 12-year-old Adela. However, the Kritzhagen she returns to is not the one she left: it's now a ghost town of graffiti, abandoned houses, and unreliable electricity. Beate flounders, sleeping all day and frequenting a bar at night, and her once inseparable children drift apart. Michael makes friends quickly and begins to explore his sexuality; Adela grows close with a cousin and buries herself in books about the Holocaust. As Beate and her children's fortunes ebb and flow, so, too, do the conditions of the town, and Grattan shines in his depiction of Kritzhagen as it evolves over the years from a place of refugee encampments and neo-Nazis to a chic vacation town. At turns funny and frightening, this is a moving, memorable portrait of a family and town in turmoil. (Mar.)

A broken family makes an uncomfortable transition into former Communist Germany in this moody debut novel. Grattan's family drama centers on three characters: Beate Haas, who as a girl escaped from East Germany with her parents in 1968, and the two children she later had in the United States, Adela and Michael. In 1990, with the Berlin Wall collapsed, Beate inherits her family home in Kritzhagen, a small town in the former East. Adela and Michael, 12 and 13 at the time, uneasily adjust to a place that "had gone from prom queen to old maid in a single season": Michael keeps busy looting abandoned houses while furtively exploring relationships with men while Adela lends support to the demonized occupants of a nearby refugee camp. Beate, meanwhile, despondent after splitting with her husband, wanders the streets at night, eventually stumbling into a job cutting hair at a bar. In the early going, the book feels like a gothic novel with a Brutalist severity: The characters are so downcast and the home so haunted by the past that emotional escape seems impossible. But when the narrative leaps back into the 1970s and forward to the 21st century, the novel brightens as the characters' motivations and experiences deepen. Michael settles into a job running a bar with a Stasi theme, Beate pursues new relationships, and Adela leaves the country just as her mom did. In the meantime, cousins and lovers provide emotional support while neofascism and homophobia buffet the family emotionally and physically. Grattan is a graceful writer and keen observer of family dynamics; the domestic themes, realist style, and emphasis on German culture can't help but recall Jonathan Franzen. But the energy Grattan expends on characterization doesn't quite extend to the plot, which feels shapeless despite some dramatic flare-ups. The lassitude is somewhat intentional, though: When you're as disoriented as this clan is, Grattan suggests, there truly is no place like home. An ambitious, artful, and winding tale of a family in search of its moorings. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.