Jennifer Steil

Jennifer Steil is a novelist, memoirist, and journalist whose years living abroad inform her attention to exile, language, and belonging. Exile Music is her third book and her second novel. It begins in 1930s Vienna, where Orly grows up in a Jewish family of classical musicians before German annexation forces her parents to seek refuge in La Paz, Bolivia. Music links the family's lost European life to its difficult new home as Orly learns local languages, encounters Andean traditions, and watches her parents respond differently to displacement. Viking issued the book in 2020, followed by a Penguin Books paperback in 2021. Steil drew on four years in Bolivia and conversations with surviving refugees and their descendants, grounding the coming-of-age story in a lesser-known wartime migration. Her earlier books include the Yemen memoir The Woman Who Fell from the Sky and the novel The Ambassador's Wife, which likewise connect intimate choices with political instability and cross-cultural experience.