Irene is a fragile woman born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from her native country to West Germany. Politically and socially isolated, Irene moves within the orbit of three troubled men, while simultaneously embarking on an inner exploration of exile, homeland, and identity.

HERTA MÜLLER was bornto a German family in Romania in 1953; after refusing to cooperate with Ceau?escu Securitate, she suffered repeated threats before she was able to emigrate to Germany in 1987, Recipient of the Kleist Prize, Germany's most prestigious literaty award, she is the author of several other books, including The Land of Green Plums also published by Northwestern University Press. 

MICHAEL HOFFMAN was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961. He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent's Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001).

"The action in this volume may be slight, but Irene's innermost consciousness—where the political has indeed become the personal--is magnificently portrayed." —New York Times Book Review

"[A] profound story of dislocation." —Kirkus Reviews