Herta Müller Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Passport (1986)
  2. The Appointment (1995)
  3. The Land of Green Plums (1995)
  4. Traveling On One Leg (2006)
  5. The Hunger Angel (2012)
  6. The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (2016)

Collections

  1. Nadirs (1999)

Non fiction

  1. Cristina and Her Double (2013)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Herta Müller Books Overview

The Passport

From the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature! The Passport has the same clipped prose cadences as Nadirs, this time applied to evoke the trapped mentality of a man so desperate for freedom that he views everything through a temporal lens, like a prisoner staring at a calendar in his cell. Wall Street Journal A swift, stinging narrative, fable like in its stoic concision and painterly detail. The Philadelphia Inquirer The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta M ller Herta Mueller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.

The Appointment

From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman’s discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life’I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.’ Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing factory worker during Ceaucescu’s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. ‘Marry me,’ the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of The Appointment pale by comparison. Herta M ller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe’s greatest writers. Born in Romania in 1953, Herta M ller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceaucescu’s secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. She has won the IMPAC Award for her novel The Land of Green Plums, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. ‘I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.’ Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. ‘Marry me,’ the notes say, with her name and address. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, she thinks over the events and people of her life under terror. In her distraction she misses her stop and finds herself alone on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale in comparison. ‘Powerful , , , Muller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman’s desire to remain human in an inhuman system.’ Newsday ‘A slim, masterfully written tale.’ Newsweek ‘A brooding, fog shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.’ The New York Times ‘Powerful , , , Muller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman’s desire to remain human in an inhuman system.’ Newsday ‘M ller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams.’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘With terse poetry, M ller brings to life a profoundly moving world…
the lyrical beauty of the prose and its unflinching moral and emotional honesty carry the reader.’ Bookforum

The Land of Green Plums

From the winner of the Intertantional IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu’s reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums is the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. Their hopes are quickly dashed: the city, no less than the countryside, bears the mark of the dictatorship’s corrosive touch. All of the narrator’s friends come to betray one another and themselves. The totalitarian state, we see, has come to inhabit every human realm: everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and perish. Herta M ller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu’s police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in simple images of hieroglyphic power men filling their mouths with unripe plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants ‘tin sheep and wooden watermelons’ M ller anatomizes a country, its citizens, and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.

Traveling On One Leg

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.

Nadirs

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta M ller’s childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child’s often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state. Herta M ller has been one of the most prolific and acclaimed German language writers of the last decade. Born in 1953 in the Banat, a German language region of Romania, she emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 and currently resides in Hamburg. She has received numerous literary awards, including the Kleist Prize. In 1998 her novel The Land of Green Plums was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Leave a Comment