Cristina García is the author of seven novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban―a Finalist for the National Book Award whose 25th Anniversary edition is coming in March 2017―The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, and King of Cuba. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. García’s work has been translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has taught at universities nationwide. Recently, she completed her tenure as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos and as Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin―its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina García brings the people of this famed city to life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing.

An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character―vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace.

A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future. （Amazon）

加利西亞的這本新作構思十分靈巧，敘述時而睿智深刻，時而撥人心弦。主人公是一個古巴裔美國人，她在2013年來到柏林尋找故事。她驚訝地發現故事就藏在柏林這個城市很多意想不到的角落——公園，博物館，咖啡屋，水族館，史普利河畔。她從動物園園長兒子那裏聽到瞭3715個動物在二戰期間的傳說，她還和一個在納粹育種計劃期間誕生的人聊過天。她與一個“一生隻離開過柏林一次”的柏林人暢談，這個柏林人曾經為瞭納粹政治宣傳齣國研究“南部黑人傳道士的演講技巧”，還作為戰俘乘坐德國潛艇去過古巴。盡管這部作品很有WG·澤巴爾德的風格，但加爾西亞還是用自己的獨到的方式，呈現瞭二戰時期柏林發生的趣事。

（界麵）