The German Book Office in New York has chosen The Giraffe's Neck by Judith Schalansky, translated by Shaun Whiteside (Bloomsbury USA, $26, 9781620403389) as its April Book of the Month.
The GBO described the novel this way: "Adaptation is everything. Inge Lohmark is well aware of that; after all, she's been teaching biology for more than 30 years. But nothing will change the fact that her school is going to be closed in four years: In this dwindling town in the eastern German countryside, there are fewer and fewer children. Inge's husband, who was a cattle inseminator before the reunification, is now breeding ostriches. Their daughter, Claudia, emigrated to the United States years ago and has no intention of having children. Everyone is resisting the course of nature that Inge teaches every day in class.
"When Inge finds herself experiencing intense feelings for a ninth-grade girl, her biologically determined worldview is shaken. And in increasingly outlandish ways, she tries to save what can no longer be saved."
Judith Schalansky works as a freelance writer and designer in Berlin and is the author of Fraktur Mon Amour and Atlas of Remote Islands, which was selected as an indie bookseller favorite of 2010 on NPR. This is her first novel.
Former chair of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors, Shaun Whiteside is a member of the PEN Writers in Translation committee, the editorial board of New Books in German and the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, where he regularly teaches at the summer school.
