Meike Ziervogel – författare

‘By turns beguiling and unsettling, Flotsam examines grief and loss through the eyes of an extraordinary child’ Rachel SeiffertTrine and her mother live in a cottage on the German coast. The mudflats that surround them disappear and reappear with the North Sea tides. The family leads a lonely existence, but each person has adapted in their own way. Anna roams the beaches collecting flotsam and jetsam to make art, while Trine loves playing on a wartime shipwreck. That is, until she loses her brother.In her taut style, Meike Ziervogel tells a coming-of-age story from 1950s Germany – a place still haunted by war. A place where people pretend not to notice the ghosts.

Shams is a young Syrian refugee woman who lives in Shatila, one of the world’s oldest refugee camps. She dreams of education and living a better life in Europe. But there are no schools in the camp, and her family opposes her dreams. Mr Tony, a poet running a charity, seems to offer a way out. But the camp appears to be taking on a life of its own, as a malevolent, all-consuming and seductive presence.

Irish Times Books Of The Year 2013Observer Books Of The Year 2013Guardian Readers' Books Of The Year 2013Short Listed For Guardian's Not The Booker Prize 2013Unloved sons turn their aggression on the outside world. Unloved daughters destroy the people they love, and then themselves.In this daring portrayal of Magda Goebbels – wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels – Meike Ziervogel unveils an historical tale of abusive mother and daughter relationships that reaches a terrifying conclusion in the last days of Nazi Germany.Magda is born at the beginning of the 20th century, the illegitimate child of a maidservant who feels burdened with a daughter she does not want. The girl grows up to become an ambitious woman, desperate for love and recognition. When Magda meets Joseph Goebbels, he appears to answer all her needs, and together they have six children. Towards the end of the Second World War, Magda has become physically and emotionally sick. As she takes her children into the Führer’s bunker, her eldest daughter Helga experiences an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

Michele is a successful business woman with a troubled private life. She has a high-powered job, a family, a husband, yet she is defined by a term of possession: she is ‘Clara’s daughter’. Nameless. When Michele moves her mother into the basement, her husband slams the door and disappears into the night. Michele increasingly hides away upstairs, as Clara weaves her conspiracies beneath.Clara’s Daughter begins in terraced houses and city parks of North London but develops, through sharp-edged monologues and surreal visions, into a primeval stand-off between mother and daughter. Eventually, Clara – the controlling matriarch – finds a way to release her daughter. But can Michele release herself?Meike Ziervogel is a master of suspenseful storytelling. In Clara’s clandestine power games and Michele’s increasingly fraught dealings with both her mother and her own highly-strung sister, Hilary, there emerges a chilling, yet poignant family tableau. Devastating in its psychological insights, Clara’s Daughter reveals unnerving truths about relationship anxieties on many levels, which emerge not only from Ziervogel’s elegant, succinct descriptions, but build steadily from the tense, silent spaces between the unfolding of main events. A divinely-crafted, almost cinematic novella, Clara’s Daughter is at once startling, moving and intensely enduring.