Spoil the Harvest

For readers of Nelio Biedermann and Olga Tokarczuk, from a dazzling new voice in European literature, this compact, magical realist epic traces the fate of a farming family living on the edge of the German empire over one momentous century, through the keen, imaginative eyes of its youngest and final descendant.

At the house on Osterstieg, in a village on the North Sea, where the vegetables turn white with grief and the dead don’t leave so much as linger, girls are born to be farmers’ daughters until they become farmers’ wives. So it is a small rebellion when Great-Grandmother Henrike secretly slaughters a sheep, defying wartime rations. It is an act of love and survival, a way to feed her family—but also a portent.

From the family legend of this slaughter, Alma, Henrike’s great-granddaughter and the last in the family line, weaves together lists, recipes, poems, superstitions, dreams, and secrets in order in an attempt to understand the lives of the women who came before her. Moving seamlessly between the tender and the grotesque, the mundane and the otherworldly—a baby is born asleep and doesn’t wake for fifteen years; smoke rises from grandfather's pipe years after he's buried; a woman plants herself and grows into a lemon tree—Alma chronicles the scars left behind by a century of promised progress and spoiled harvests.

A hypnotic mix of laconic wit with flickers of shimmering magic, Spoil the Harvest is a masterwork of emotional precision that asks what it means for a child to reckon with the forces of history, and for a young woman to inherit an ending.