Book club
Lisez la littérature allemande !

Thu, 02/06/2025
6:30 PM Goethe-Institut Montreal

Our upcoming book club will feature a German novel, and will take place Thursday February 6 at 6:30 pm at the Goethe-Institut Montreal.

We will discuss the novel "Where you come from" by Saša Stanišic (translated by Damion Searls). The discussion will be held in French and moderated by Marie-Pierre Poulin, librarian at the Goethe-Institut Montreal.

Please confirm your presence before February 5 at the following address:
lisezleurope-mtl@goethe.de.

About the novel:
Recipient of the German Book Prize in 2019.

In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.

Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons’ den. Translated by Damion Searls, it’s a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
(tinhouse.com)


The book can be obtained (in French) at the following bookstores:

Librairie Gallimard: (10% discount for Lisez l’Europe members)
librairie@gallimardmontreal.com
514 499-2012

Librairie du Square au Carré St-Louis:
librairiedusquare@librairiedusquare.com
514 845-7617

Librairie du Square - Outremont:
outremont@librairiedusquare.com
514 303-0612

You can find the ebook in English at Indigo.ca

French copies (book and ebook) are also available through the Grande Bibliothèque and the Montreal public library network. One book and one ebook copy in German are available through the library of the Goethe-Institut Montreal.