Gilgi

Description

Gilgi is a secretary in a hosiery firm, but she's not going to stay there for long: she's disciplined and ambitious. But then she falls in love with Martin, a wealthy businessman, and leaves her job for domestic bliss - which turns out to be not that blissful, and Gilgi finds herself a single mother. Revolutionary at the time for its treatment of sexual harassment, abortion, single motherhood and the concept of the 'New Woman', Gilgi remains a perceptive and beautifully constructed novel about one woman's path to maturity.

IRMGARD KEUN become an overnight sensation in German literary circles with the publication of her first novel, Gilgi, at the age of 21. Her second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, shot to bestseller status in 1932, only to be placed the next year on an early Nazi blacklist. Eventually sentenced to death by the Nazis, she fled the country again and staged her own suicide ... then snuck back into Germany where she lived undercover for the duration of the war. She died in 1982, shortly after her work was rediscovered by feminist critics and general readers in Germany. Translator GEOFF WILKES is a Lecturer in German at the University of Queensland. He wrote the afterwords to Keun's novel After Midnight and to Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone.

"A formidable literary talent." -Eileen Battersby's Books of the Year 2014, The Irish Times Praise for After Midnight by Irmgard Keun "The overwhelming power of Keun's work lies in her surprisingly raw, witty, and resonant feminine voices." -Bookslut "Explosive....Even reading After Midnight today feels dangerous... Haunts far beyond its final page. -NPR "Acerbically observed by this youthful, clever, undeceived eye....Crystalline yet acid." -Jewish Chronicle