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The cover of Nightberries by Elina Penner, translated by Bradley Schmidt

Nightberries

By (author): Elina Penner

Translated by: Bradley Schmidt

Where is your husband? Nelli doesn’t seem to be in crisis—or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving. A tense and unusual situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life.

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AUTHOR

Elina Penner

Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and came to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch is her mother tongue. After years in Berlin and the U.S., she lives with her family in East Westphalia and is a successful blogger. This novel, her first, was published in 2022 as Nachtbeeren by Aufbau Verlage in Berlin. In 2023, she released the non-fiction collection Migrantenmutti; her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen will be published in Germany later this year.


AUTHOR

Bradley Schmidt

Bradley Schmidt is an American writer and translator. He grew up in a Mennonite community in Kansas,and now teaches and works in Germany as a translator, also teaching writing and translation at Leipzig University.


Reviews

Reflects on trauma identity and language in a dark and often humorous wayNelli lived as a devout Mennonite until one day her son discovered the mortal remains of his father carefully portioned in Ziploc bags tucked between zwieback and dumplings in the basement freezer As the story unfolds and facts of the case are slowly revealed the narrator illuminates the everyday life of German Mennonites from the Soviet Unionreview of German novel Nachtbeeren in Anabaptist World



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Details

Dimensions:

152 Pages
9in * 6in * 0.4in
1lb

Published:

March 01, 2026

Publisher:

CMU Press

ISBN:

9781987986280

Book Subjects:

FICTION / Amish & Mennonite

Language:

eng

Other Titles by Elina Penner

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