About the 1,000 Coils of Fear (Paperback Novel)

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize
Longlisted for the National Translation Award

A multilayered and witty debut novel about the life of a Black German woman living in Berlin and New York during the chaos of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, who fights to belong without losing her identity
A young woman attends a play about the fall of the Berlin Wall—and realizes she is the only Black person in the audience.

She and her boyfriend hang out by a lake outside Berlin—and four neo-Nazis show up.

In New York, she has sex with a stranger on the night of the 2016 presidential election—and wakes up to panicked texts from her friends in Germany about Donald Trump’s unlikely victory.

Engaging in a witty Q&A with herself—or is it her alter ego?—she takes stock of our rapidly changing times, and tells the story of her family: Her mother, a punk in former East Germany who never found the freedom she dreamed of. Her Angolan father, who returned to his home country shortly after she was born to start a second family. Her grandmother, whose life of obedience to party principles brought her prosperity and security but not happiness. And her twin brother, died at the age of nineteen.

Heartrending, opinionated, and wry, Olivia Wenzel’s remarkable debut novel is a clear-sighted and polyphonic investigation into what it really means to belong and what price wanting to belong can exact.