1,000 Coils of Fear

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize
Longlisted for the National Translation Award
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year

“[A] stunning debut novel, is translated superbly by Priscilla Layne. It’s a powerful evocation of a life marked by racism; one step away from the ‘hatred that refugees face permanently.’ There’s much to admire in her incisiveness, originality and compassion.” —Lucy Popescu, The Observer

“A debut novel as layered and melodic as any symphony or opera.” —Karla Strand, Ms.

“Wenzel’s unique literary voice carries the reader through meditations on origins, grief, racial identity, love, and belonging.” —Booklist

“A powerful portrait of a woman finding, losing, and rediscovering herself in 21st-century Germany . . . Wenzel has a knack for capturing feelings and moments of tension . . . An exciting, confident debut.” —Publishers Weekly

“German musician, performer, and playwright Wenzel makes an auspicious fiction debut . . . A prismatic novel, thoughtful and unsettling.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A Top Summer Debut.” —Library Journal

“An audacious and disturbing novel.” —Michelle de Kretser, author of Scary Monsters

“This novel’s mixed-race young narrator interrogates her own painful past and confusion of selves—German Angolan, child of an East Germany erased by unification, boy lovers girl lovers, badass and vulnerable, cowering and defiant—in a voice so exuberant, inventive, brainy, sensitive, and hilarious that it’s like a pyrotechnic flare illuminating the whole woman, past and present, radiant, unique, a voice and a novel to take with us into the future.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy

“Olivia Wenzel’s bold and exceptional novel, 1,000 Coils of Fear, tells stories in many voices—of her estranged family, of female and male lovers, of her nation, once home to Nazis and the KGB, still inhospitable to immigrants, and to its Black German author. Wenzel’s novel is not just of and from contemporary Germany, it proposes a different German novel. Her impressive writing, born of a brilliant mind, surprises—stylistically, and by its frankness and associations. An uncompromising consciousness leaps from sentence to sentence, city to city, in love, depressed, alienated, afraid, and contradictory. She is asked, ‘Where are you?’ She asks, ‘Where am I?’ I rode in the passenger seat, beside the beauty and strangeness of 1,000 Coils of Fear.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions and MOTHERCARE