A forested property on a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin lies at the heart of this darkly sensual, elegiac novel. Visitation offers us the stories of twelve individuals who make their home here. The narrative weaves in and out of history and time, shimmering through the public and secret spaces of a magical little house and showing us the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation presents a literary mosaic of the last century in Germany, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation with its dramatic stories and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.
The brutality of her subjects, combined with the fierce intelligence and tenderness at work behind her restrained unvarnished prose, is overwhelming.
— Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
Jenny Erpenbeck is the rising star of the German literary scene.
— Cosmopolitan
Love, death and passion, from the Weimar Republic to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Wonderful German prose.
— Playboy
Erpenbeck will get under your skin.
— Washington Post Book World
Visitation adds to her compact scenarios something intangible and enormous, which works on them from outside their modest frames with a force eroding human history and its claims to establish durable meaning.
— The Nation
Jenny Erpenbeck’s writing is a lure that leads us––off-centre, as one travels into a vortex––into the most haunted and haunting territory. This is a novel of profound clarity and precise grief.