"With this collection of texts, I am looking back for the first time at many years of my life, at the thoughts that filled my life from day to day."
Starting with her childhood days in East Berlin, Not a Novel, provides a glimpse of growing up in the GDR and of what it was like to be twenty-two when the wall collapsed; it takes us through Erpenbeck’s early adult years, working in a bakery after immersing herself in the worlds of music, theater, and opera, and ultimately discovering her path as a writer.
