The Land of Green Plums

First edition in English. Sm. 8vo., 242 pp. Quarter-bound blue cloth over mauve paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust jacket image from the 1991 series "Life, Love, Death & Other Such Trifles" by the Czech art photographer Jan Saudek (priced $23.00 to front flap).

Signed by Author to the title page at the Goethe Institute in Athens on March 21, 2018, on the occasion of the first Greek public screening of the documentary Das Alphabet der Angst (2015), which explores her life under Ceausescu's repressive regime. Bilingual Event programme, printed in German and Greek, laid in.

Translated from the German by Michael Hoffman. Originally published under the title Herztier by Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, in 1994.

Author's second novel. Winner of the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A semi-autobiographical account of life under Ceausescu's reign of terror, when the totalitarian state came to inhabit every aspect of a citizen's existence, to the extent that people "either bent to the oppressors' will, or resisted them and perished". The German title, Herztier, refers to the Romanian neologism inimal, a fusion of the words inimă (Herz/ heart) and animal (Tier), implying the heart-animal "we all carry within us that determines our character and disposition".

Recipient of the 1994 Kleist Prize, the 2006 Würth Prize for European Literature, as well as the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature with the Swedish Academy singling out Müller's "refus[al] to let the inhumane side of life under Communism be forgotten," in its citation. "A kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity, and brutality." –New York Times Book Review