What I expected: a story about someone from East Germany, escaping, and then returning to a united country.

What I got: a dog’s breakfast.

The Recent East by Thomas Grattan is a multi-generational novel that pivots around Beate Haas, who defected from East Germany as a child, and then, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, returns to Germany with her two teenagers, Michael and Adela, to reclaim her parents’ abandoned mansion. The novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Beate’s childhood to her becoming a grandmother.

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