Stella

“Like W.G. Sebald at his best, Lenz solicits the reader’s grief through lexical restraint: the story’s sedate tone, combined with its nautical-rural setting, perfectly renders the texture of a daydream.”—The New Yorker

“We can thank heaven for a small – but exquisite – mercy in the shape of Siegfried Lenz’s [Stella]….a superbly crafted novella of first love, with a tenderly evocative sense of place, mood and era….Suggestively rich in overtones and undercurrents, Lenz’s beautiful miniature also stands alone as a masterclass in ‘the grammar of farewell’.”—The Independent

“This book expresses, with extreme subtlety . . . the torments of first love and the pain of parting . . . [It] stands poignantly beside the tales of such lovers as Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet.” —L’Express

“We have Siegfried Lenz to thank for a poetic book—perhaps his most beautiful.” —Marchel Reich-Ranicki, Frankfurter Allgemeine