Julia Franck

Julia Franck is a German novelist whose fiction examines family secrecy, political division, and the ways public systems enter private life. Back to Back follows siblings Thomas and Ella in East Berlin during the 1950s and 1960s. Their mother, Käthe, is a sculptor deeply committed to the socialist state but emotionally distant at home, leaving the children to negotiate neglect, loyalty, and the constraints of their surroundings. The novel’s alternating attention to brother and sister makes shared history produce sharply different forms of endurance. Grove Press published Anthea Bell’s English translation of the German novel Rücken an Rücken in 2013. Franck was born in East Berlin, moved with her family to West Germany as a child, and later studied at the Free University of Berlin. Her wider work, including The Blind Side of the Heart, repeatedly connects fractured families with twentieth-century German history. Back to Back concentrates that method within one household, where ideology can be monumental in public and painfully inadequate as care.