The Blind Side of the Heart
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409077657
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432

The Blind Side of the Heart

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EBook
1 Sep 2010
Paperback
1 Sep 2010
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An international bestseller, great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.

Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns.

This is a tale of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.

Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010.
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409077657
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
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About the author

Julia Franck

Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. Her novel The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize and sold over a million copies in Germany alone. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and US magazine Kirkus Reviews. West is her third novel to be translated into English.

Also by Julia Franck

West
Back to Back
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Praise for The Blind Side of the Heart

A rich, affecting novel

David Evans, Independent on Sunday, Christmas round up

Beautifully constructed... Franck has a remarkable ability to capture the nuances of human behaviour,and her subtle depiction of Helene's growing coldness, or "blindness", and the wider blindness of a society heading for disaster, is utterly compelling

Independent on Sunday

Elegant novel ... Franck's great strength is her ability to place her characters in unenviable situations yet retain the reader's sympathy

Gordon Darroch, Herald

Franck's command of the language of misery and loss is awesome, but so is her gift for describing the warmth of burgeoning life when things are going right

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

Generations of women survive, most movingly, in the wreckage left by total war

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Heart-rending

A. S. Byatt, Guardian

It is an admirable book and in its best passages is inspired and haunting

Jane Yager, Times Literary Supplement

It is not surprising that this book won the German Book Prize... It is a rich moving and complex novel

Allan Massie, The Scotsman

One of the most haunting works I have ever read about 20th century Germany...The book's moral perspective is faultless, as is Franck's sensitivity to character, sexuality and the struggle to be a free woman in a fascist society...The Blind Side of the Heart is a masterpiece

Julia Pascal, The Independent

Read it and weep

http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com

The opening of Julia Frank's novel is among the most powerful in recent years, a narrative so assured that the reader is gripped...This is a great, big silence-breaker of a novel, a laser beam into the German darkness from a writer who, one feels, has a great deal more to say

Norman Lebrecht, Evening Standard

There is a relentless sense of purpose about the complex, ever-shifting narrative that continually tests the reader

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

With its intriguing plot and strong characterisation, Julia Franck's novel depicts beautifully both personal and historical tragedies, and gives us a compelling portrait of a remarkable woman in difficult times

WBQ