Meike Ziervogel

Magda is born at the beginning of the 20th century, the illegitimate child of a maidservant who feels burdened with a daughter she does not want. The girl grows up to become an ambitious woman, desperate for love and recognition. When Magda meets Joseph Goebbels, he appears to answer all her needs, and together they have six children. Towards the end of the Second World War, Magda has become physically and emotionally sick. As she takes her children into the Führer's bunker, her eldest daughter Helga experiences an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

Magda

A master of suspenseful storytelling, Meike Ziervogel's new novel testifies to our belief that humanity can thrive against all odds.Set at the end of the Second World War when 11 million Germans fled from east to west, The Photographer is a compelling and life-affirming exploration of love and survival in times of mass migration.Albert is a young photographer who dreams of making his mark in the magazines of Berlin and Paris. When he falls for Trude his happiness appears complete. Then the war breaks out. While Albert is sent to the front, Trude and their son Peter have to flee from the advancing Russian army. Eventually they are reunited. But do Albert and Trude have the strength to start their relationship anew?In a Europe of ruined cities and refugee camps, the family learns to respect each other's flaws and, in doing so, discovers their own personal strengths.

The Photographer

Lydia, a woman in her early thirties, lives in London. She lacks a purpose and loses herself in a string of affairs. When she meets Rabia, a convert to Islam, the Moslem rituals and the Arabic language offer her a new beginning. Lydia becomes Kauthar. She falls in love with Rafiq, an Iraqi-born doctor, and her life seems complete. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 tests their relationship. While Kauthar becomes increasingly fundamental in her beliefs, Rafiq returns to war-torn Baghdad to work in a hospital. Kauthar follows her husband – and the consequences are terrifying.Kauthar charts the life of a white British woman who converts to Islam. The story explores the reasons why and analyses the psychological factors that lead her to distort and misuse her religious faith. Ultimately, Kauthar is a novel about how longing for love can result in violent delusion.

Kauthar

Michele is a successful business woman with a troubled private life. She has a high-powered job, a family, a husband, yet she is defined by a term of possession: she is ‘Clara’s daughter’. Nameless. When Michele moves her mother into the basement, her husband slams the door and disappears into the night. Michele increasingly hides away upstairs, as Clara weaves her conspiracies beneath.Clara’s Daughter begins in terraced houses and city parks of North London but develops, through sharp-edged monologues and surreal visions, into a primeval stand-off between mother and daughter. Eventually, Clara – the controlling matriarch – finds a way to release her daughter. But can Michele release herself?Meike Ziervogel is a master of suspenseful storytelling. In Clara’s clandestine power games and Michele’s increasingly fraught dealings with both her mother and her own highly-strung sister, Hilary, there emerges a chilling, yet poignant family tableau. Devastating in its psychological insights, Clara’s Daughter reveals unnerving truths about relationship anxieties on many levels, which emerge not only from Ziervogel’s elegant, succinct descriptions, but build steadily from the tense, silent spaces between the unfolding of main events. A divinely-crafted, almost cinematic novella, Clara’s Daughter is at once startling, moving and intensely enduring.

Clara's Daughter

'By turns beguiling and unsettling, Flotsam examines grief and loss through the eyes of an extraordinary child' Rachel SeiffertTrine and her mother live in a cottage on the German coast. The mudflats that surround them disappear and reappear with the North Sea tides. The family leads a lonely existence, but each person has adapted in their own way. Anna roams the beaches collecting flotsam and jetsam to make art, while Trine loves playing on a wartime shipwreck. That is, until she loses her brother.In her taut style, Meike Ziervogel tells a coming-of-age story from 1950s Germany - a place still haunted by war. A place where people pretend not to notice the ghosts.

Meike Ziervogel

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