Blood Money

“In this masterful novel, Anna Seghers examines how the private decisions of numerous individuals lead to fatal political consequences. She is that rare author whose books never age.”
—Jenny Erpenbeck

“Anna Seghers was an admirable woman in many ways, but above all she was a remarkable humanist: she became a model of cultural resistance and ideological struggle who cut across borders, and who, still today, thanks to her work, transcends time and lives on in our memory. Anna Seghers’ novels don’t only recount stories of terror, escape, and oppression; they are a call to compassion and solidarity.” —Fernanda Melchor

“Seghers is not only an unflinching witness of twentieth-century terror; she is also a master of what the blurbers of paperbacks used to call burn-the-midnight-oil suspense. She sketches her characters in a few quick strokes, then subjects them to excruciating tension … [Blood Money is] Seghers’s first major novel—a seamless blend of journalistic realism and mythic allusion. The opening paragraphs at once apply an iron grip … [translator Lucy Jones] excellently conveys the incisive bite of the writing.” —Alex Ross, The New Yorker

“Like Dante, Leo Tolstoy, and more recently Nadine Gordimer, Seghers was an epic writer who wrote against the grain of those in power. Her works evoke the spirit of her time in ways that most histories and documentaries cannot. Anyone who wants to know how people seeking justice can face adversity and still retain hope should read her books.” —Helen Fehervary, Jacobin

“Written in the early 1930s as the Nazis rose to power … [Blood Money] chronicles the moral unraveling of a small village on the Rhine … Skillfully translated by Jones, it’s a striking examination of how a democratic society surrendered itself to authoritarianism through ordinary human passion rather than extraordinary evil.” —Publishers Weekly

“Seghers was concerned with major questions, and she pursued those questions in her fiction relentlessly. What does fascism do to a person’s soul? she asks again and again.” —Kirkus Reviews

Anna Seghers (1900-1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She published her first story in 1924 and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fishermen, in 1929. After World War II she moved to East Berlin, where she became an emblematic figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as president of the Writers Union and publishing at a steady pace. Transit, The Seventh Cross, and The Dead Girls’ Class Trip: Selected Stories are also available from NYRB Classics.

Lucy Jones is a literary translator and writer who lives in Berlin. She has translated works by Ronald M. Schernikau, Charlotte Gneuß, Brigitte Reimann, Theresia Enzensberger, and others. Her writing has been published in SAND Journal, Pigeon Papers, Litro, 3:AM Magazine, and STAT®REC. She is a cofounder of Transfiction, a collective of translators in Berlin.

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