"A sweeping multigenerational novel following a family in East Germany as they fracture and come back together"--

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate Haas, who defected from East Germany as a child, is notified that her parents' abandoned mansion is available for her to reclaim. Newly divorced and eager to escape upstate New York, she arrives with her two teenagers to discover a city that has become an unrecognizable ghost town. Her son Michael, free to be gay, takes to looting empty houses and partying with wannabe anarchists; daughter Adela, fascinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, buries herself in books and finds companionship in a previously unknown cousin. As the town changes from dismantled city to refugee haven and neo-Nazi hotbed, to a desirable seaside resort town, two episodes of devastating violence come to define the family forever. -- adapted from jacket