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A masterful new novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose Nobel Prize CommitteeIt was an icy morning in January when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta MxFCller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity.