Spoil the Harvest

THE STORY BEGINS with my great-grandmother, born a farmer's daughter on the first day of the new century in a village on the North Sea.

Alma's childhood is full of her family's stories.

The sowing in the spring, the haymaking in summer, the potato harvest in autumn. A boy who sleeps through his whole childhood.

The day Grandmother heard the planes come, standing on the bridge over the stream. The dark-eyed Austrian soldier who approached her as she walked home from the baker's.

And in all of the stories, throughout the generations: the midwife, and the woman who lays out the dead.

From a dazzling new voice in European literature, Spoil the Harvest tells the story of a century in one German-Austrian family. Darkly witty, rich in restrained emotion, it interleaves the harsh brutality of rural life with surreal, magical details to paint an unforgettable portrait of lives shaped by the rhythms and cycles of the earth - as well as by all those who have gone before.