Higher Ground

Stelling makes a blistering English-language debut with this incendiary screed about hypocrisy and privilege among a group of friends in Berlin. Resi is part of a group of friends she’s known since childhood. She is the poor one among them, and while all were leftists when they were younger, her friends have since found comfort and stability, and fail to acknowledge the class difference between themselves and Resi. Her friends all own apartments in a glitzy new co-op building, for instance, while Resi and her family sublet a cheap, decrepit flat nearby from her old friends Vera and Frank. After Resi publishes an essay about what it’s like to live in a “building without a name,” followed by a successful book, she’s served with an eviction notice and loses her friends, who can’t stomach Resi’s class critiques. Stelling frames the narrative as a long letter to Resi’s oldest child, Bea, in which Resi details her difficult childhood, her mother’s life, and the hypocrisy behind her privileged friends’ notion of self-determination. A wry warning to Bea on the first page—“Families are a hotbed of neuroses, and the ruler of this particular hotbed, our nest, is me”—suggests Resi’s version is open to interpretation. This biting class critique is hard to turn away from. (May)