Written late in Christa Wolf’s life, In the Flesh is a feverish, compressed novel of illness, memory, politics and bodily collapse.

A woman lies in hospital, moving through tests, corridors, machines, procedures; all while her mind drifts through the afterlife of East Germany. The body here is not treated as a tidy metaphor. It is an unreliable archive: leaking, monitored, interpreted, spoken over, and refusing to become only evidence.

The hospital becomes a state of its own, with its rituals, commands, machines and softly menacing efficiencies; the self becomes something reviewed under fluorescent light. A sharp one for readers interested in European modernism, illness writing, feminist interiority or post-socialist memory.

First US edition hardback. Published by David R. Godine / Verba Mundi in 2005. Translated from the German by John S. Barrett. Copyright page states “First Edition.” Good used condition, with light shelf wear to jacket/boards; pages clean and binding sound.