'Distinct, biting, bristling, swirling' Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House
From award-winning author Olivia Wenzel comes a captivating and unsettling literary debut about race, politics, feminism, motherhood, nationality and enduring love.
A young woman attends a play about the Berlin Wall coming down and is the only Black person in the audience.
She is sitting with her boyfriend by a bathing lake and four neo-Nazis show up.
In New York, she witnesses Trump's election victory in a strange hotel room and later awakes to panicked messages from friends.
Engaging in a witty question and answer with herself, the narrator looks at our rapidly changing times and tells the story of her family: her mother, who was a punk in East Germany and never had the freedom she dreamed of and her absent Angolan father. But in the background of everything is the memory of her twin brother, who died when they were nineteen.
'So exuberant, inventive, brainy, sensitive and hilarious'
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, author of Monkey Boy
'An audacious and disturbing novel.'
MICHELLE DE KRETSER, author of Scary Monsters

Olivia Wenzel, born in Weimar in former East Germany in 1985, read Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice at the University of Hildesheim and now lives and works in Berlin. She writes drama and prose and makes music as Otis Foulie. Wenzel's plays have been performed at leading theatres like Munich's Kammerspiele, Hamburg's Thalia Theater, Deutsches Theater Berlin and Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. Alongside her writing, she runs workshops for children and young adults. 1000 Coils of Fear is her first novel.