A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century —and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world"Simply, a masterpiece...Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full." —Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Horse

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight and in which one in fifty East Germans were informing on their fellow citizens, there are thousands of captivating stories. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might have started World War II...

East Germany may have been—until now—the most perfected surveillance state of all time. In Stasiland Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi.She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with th...

This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century —and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world"Simply, a masterpiece...Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full." —Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of HorseAt the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak ov...