Barbara Isn’t Dying

Walter Schmidt has lived his whole life within the narrow, comfortable confines of traditional gender roles: he has made it to retirement without learning how to fry an egg or use a vacuum cleaner. After all, he could always count on his wife, Barbara. But, when one morning she can't -or won't! -get up from bed anymore, everything changes.

With biting humour and great warmth, Alina Bronsky writes about how Walter, nearing the end of his life, is suddenly forced to reinvent himself as a caregiver and househusband, and become the caring partner he never was in all his years with Barbara. Little by little, Walter's rough facade begins to crumble, and with it his old certainties about his life and family.

"Thrilling and moving in equal measure." Berliner Zeitung
“A wise, carefully constructed novel about fragile hidden identities.” The Washington Post
“Warm, poignant and acerbically funny... a sharp-eyed and unsentimental character study.” Star Tribune
“Bronsky excels in relating heartache through a narrator who refuses to acknowledge it...insightful and subversive, funny and disturbing.” Financial Times
“Hilarious, disturbing, and always irreverent.” Kirkus Reviews

Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010); The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly; Just Call Me Superhero (Europa, 2014), Baba Dunja's Last Love (Europa, 2016), and My Grandmother's Braid (Europa, 2021). Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS. He is the author of Burning Down the Haus, a history of political struggle and punk music in East Germany. Prior to starting his writing career, he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.

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