Description
A hilarious tragic novel about a would-be movie star in 1920s Berlin from the author of Child of All Nations Doris is going to be a big star. Wearing a stolen fur coat and recently fired from her office job she takes an all-night train to Berlin to make it in the movies. But what she encounters in the city is not fame and fortune but gnawing hunger seedy bars and exploitative men – and as Doris sinks ever lower she resorts to desperate measures to survive. Very funny and intensely moving this is a dazzling portrait of roaring Berlin in the 1920s and a poignant exploration of the doomed pursuit of fame and glamour. The Artificial Silk Girl was a huge bestseller in Weimar Germany before the Nazis banned it and is today Keun’s best-loved book in Germany. Funny fresh and radical in its dissection of the limited options available to working women it is a novel that speaks to our times.