Scherbenpark

Title: Broken Glass Park
Genre: Novel

Complete English translation available (published in April 2010)
Author chosen as one of the Top 20 writers under 40 by the FAZ in 2012

It can still happen like this: A young, unknown writer offers her manuscript to the editor via Email, he bids her to send it, reads it at once and offers a contract a week later. Alina Bronsky took the publishing house by storm with her debut.

What makes it so special? On the one hand, there is 17-year-old Sascha Naimann who came from Moscow to Germany and lives with her younger brother and sister in the Park of Fragments – a ghetto of high-rise buildings ruled by its own laws which she breaks with fierce determination. On the other, there is the Catholic elite high school, which accepted Sascha because of her giftedness and her precarious living conditions, with her overprotected and well-dressed schoolmates who do not have a clue of algebra but a tight leisure time agenda. And there is the tone of how Sascha tells her story: self-assured and straightforward, casually and dryly she comments on her environment: the desperate pursuit of happiness, freedom and wealth, the perpetual failure around her and her own rebellion.

Sascha starts her story with two resolutions: She wants to write a book for her mother and she wants to kill Vadim, her stepfather. What role Vadim plays, why she lives without a mother but with her great-aunt, how the family was shattered and at the same time made famous by a crime, and what it means to be drawn into a ménage a trois with a journalist and his 16-year-old son – all this she tells with heart, humour and rousing energy.
Sascha is a commuter between two worlds and not at home in either of them but sharp-tongued and precocious enough to stand her ground – and to take the reader with her on a constantly accelerating journey.

Italy: Edizioni E/O / Poland: Wydawnictwo C & T / USA: Europa Editions / Argentina: Recursos Editoriales / Israel: Kinneret-Zmora-Dvir / Turkey: Ithaka / Netherlands: De Geus / Romania: Allfa

Alina Bronsky, born in 1978 in Iekaterinburg/Russia, spent her childhood on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains and her youth in Marburg and Darmstadt. After dropping out of medical school, she worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency and as journalist for a daily newspaper. She lives in Frankfurt.
Scherbenpark (Park of Fragments) is her first literary publication.

Alina Bronsky im Interview auf umagazine.de
Alina Bronsky im Videoportrait beim Bachmannpreis
Homepage Scherbenpark