Flight of Ashes by Monika Maron. Translated by David Newton Marinelli. 1986 Readers International (c/r 1981), 188 pages. According to the jacket copy: "Monika Maron is a daughter of the East German political elite---her father was interior minister in the infancy of the communist state. Yet her novel breaks decisively with the prescribed silences of her milieu---about the press, the Party, the position of women, the real lives of workers in a Workers' State." In a Publishers Weekly review of Flight of Ashes, her first novel, "What ensues is a poignant tale of a woman's battle to be herself, impatient, honest, emotional and a dreamer like her peasant grandfather in a society where people think and move like robots."

Condition: VG

"What do I have to fear? The bed I'll die in. The life that I'm not living. The monotony unto death and thereafter."