The Unfinished

A profound novel detailing the brutal legacy of Nazism on four generations of a family in Germany. Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four womenseventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hannas daughter Annaare ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutesthe wild expulsions of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna? Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimathomelandis both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Annas son. A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirgls unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium.