‘The Bird God’
Jung und Jung, February 2018
Shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2018
English Info & Sample Translation
A great narrator and a grim story – a terrific novel!
The members of a science-oriented family are drawn into the elusive myth of a Bird God through a coincidental discovery in a church picture, which has an undertow that neither they nor the reader can resist. Especially as soon as it turns out that this myth is not just a myth…
The devotees of the Bird God live in a fabulous but wretched area of the earth, and appear not so much to be devoted to him as to have surrendered. In this irresistible novel, a secret world emerges as ours, in which nature abandons its friendship and we face its aggression and gloom.
Susanne Röckel, born in Darmstadt in 1953, studied Romance Languages and German Studies in Berlin and Paris and lives in Munich as a writer and translator (of Paula Fox, Antonia S. Byatt, Irène Némirovsky, Joyce Carol Oates and others). Numerous awards, including the Mara Cassens Prize 1998, Tukan Prize 1999. Most recently published: Forgotten Museums (2008).
