The Family Friend | Julia Franck | Granta Magazine

The Family Friend

Julia Franck

Translated by Eleanor Collins

‘We’ve got a lot of family friends but Thorsten has been coming round far too often recently and I wonder whether I shouldn’t tell her that sometime.’

Julia Franck

Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. Her novel The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize and sold over a million copies in Germany alone. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian. Back to Back was longlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and her third novel to be translated into English, West, is being published by Harvill Secker on 30 October.

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Translated by Eleanor Collins

Eleanor Collins is currently completing a degree in French and German at Trinity College, Cambridge, specialising in film, literature and history. She has just completed a year abroad in Berlin, where she worked as a volunteer with children and young adults.

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