The Dark Room: A Novel - Hardcover

“Deftly (Seiffert) hangs large ideas on the vivid private experiences of her principal characters who appear in separate, self-contained sections. In a poignant–and ultimately optimistic–fashion, they trace a progress in moral awareness: from Hitlerian delusion and postwar denial to a readiness for truth and responsibility. Loosely, they form an allegory of the German soul in its passage over 80 years.”
-- The New York Times Book Review

“Seiffert gives us pictures as evocative as they are ghostly, as fragmented as they are telling. The novel unfolds as a triptych . . . (of) ordinary people. . . whom Seiffert brilliantly captures in her lens.”
-- Los Angeles Times

“This lyrical debut collection of novellas explores the experience of ‘ordinary’ Germans–the descendents of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers–and poses questions about the country’s psychological and political inheritance with rare insight and humanity.”
-- The New Yorker

“A novel about the German soul in the 20th century, this debut work stuns with its simplicity of style and hugeness of subject.”
-- Philadelphia Inquirer

“A novel of uncommon perception, THE DARK ROOM deserves to be placed alongside such exemplary postwar German fictional works as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Lost.”
-- Book Forum

“Rachel Seiffert’s storytelling is completely absorbing and finally overwhelming in its detail, its relentless action, and its beautiful, shy eloquence. The Dark Room, in its strategies for approaching the unwatchable, the unseeable, is brilliant, and in its closing pages, it brings to light a set of images that no reader is ever likely to forget.”
—Charles Baxter,
author of The Feast of Love

“Rachel Seiffert writes movingly about three generations of
Germans confined by selective blindness and silence: a patriotic
photographer who limits his vision to the eye of the camera; a courageous refugee girl who stays focused on her own family’s suffering; and a teacher who is compelled and yet terrified to
pursue his search for the truth. Outstanding.”
—Ursula Hegi,
author of Stones from the River

Rachel Seiffert was born in England in 1971 and now lives in
Germany