Aftertime

Trade Cloth – $28.00

ISBN 978-0-8101-1504-0

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Contributors

Olaf G. Klein (Author)

Margot Bettauer Dembo (Translator)

Publication Date

May 1999

Aftertime

Olaf Georg Klein

In her last year at the university in Kiev and shortly before she is to take her final examinations, the narrator is persuaded to go for a lake cruise north of the city. Sixty miles away, a nuclear reactor explodes. Returning to Berlin, she recognizes with mounting horror the symptoms that belie the Soviet government's denials and becomes obsessed with having a healthy baby--the only proof to herself and to the world that she has been untouched by the disaster.

About the Author

George Olaf Klein was born in 1955 in the former East Berlin. He has published stories, novels, and radio plays in his native Germany; he recently spent a year as a writer-in-residence at Pennsylvania's Dickinson College.

Margot Bettauer Dembo is an editor at the American Museum of Natural History and is the translator of Triumph of Hope, Europa, Europa, and Lost in a Labyrinth of Red Tape.

Reviews

"Alternately hopeful and bitter, Aftertime delves convincingly into the psyche of a woman clinging desperately to denial. Klein's nameless heroine movingly recounts her effort to hold back the horrible fate that circumstances have decreed for her." --Booklist

"It is important for us to be prodded out of our apathy from time to time. . . . The problems and dangers described are still relevant today, except that it seems we are getting used to them and accommodating ourselves to them. [This] detailed and sensitive description . . . is certain to arouse readers." --Christa Wolf, author of Accident