Masterfully crafted with humour, gorgeous prose, and a powerful understanding of history and heritage,&nbsp;The Recent East&nbsp;is the profoundly affecting story of a family upended by displacement and loss, and the extraordinary debut of an empathetic and ambitious storyteller. 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 her bleak life in upstate New York, where she moved as an adult, she arrives with her two teenagers to discover a city that has become an unrecognizable ghost town. The move fractures the siblings’ close relationship, as Michael, free to be gay, takes to looting empty houses and partying with wannabe anarchists, while Adela, fascinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, buries herself in books and finds companionship in a previously unknown cousin. Over time, the town itself changes—from dismantled city to refugee haven and neo-Nazi hotbed, and eventually to a desirable seaside resort town. In the midst of that change, two episodes of devastating, fateful violence come to define the family forever. "&nbsp;...&nbsp;His command of his story’s intricate continuities, something rarer in a novelist than readers often realize, may signal how long and deeply he has been imagining the book ...&nbsp;Grattan’s rarer achievement is to have written a historical novel whose when and where, however well established, are not really determinative, and whose people remain individual riddles instead of political integers ... Fiction, as always, will have to play catch-up, which is what Thomas Grattan’s career now seems splendidly to be doing."&nbsp; -&nbsp;&nbsp;Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

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