Two strikingly new voices came to JBW 2011, original and poetic, revisit the themes of loss and belonging, nourished by their own experiences. In Jenny Erbenbeck’s haunting novel, Visitation the inhabitants of a house by a lake are displaced by history, one family after the other. Julya Rabinovich’s Splithead traces the story of a young girl is taken on a plane from Leningrad, without knowing that she is leaving the country for good. We discovered how beautiful writing is borne from the p...

To Michael Faber, Jenny Erpenbeck is ‘one of the finest, most exciting authors alive.’ Her novel The End of Days is a story of the 20th century traced through the alternative lives of a single woman. In Elsewhere, Doron Rabinovici’s often hilarious, fast-paced and moving novel set between Vienna and Tel Aviv, he confronts themes of identity, belonging and antisemitism; long-...