"Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic." -- Claire Tomalin, Guardian "Books of the Year"

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.

Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against East Germany's communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain--and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany's brutal state security force. In thetradition of Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Funder's Stasiland is a masterpiece of investigative reporting, written with novelistic vividness and the compelling intensity of a universal, real-life story.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterward the two Germanys reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. Anna Funder's bestselling Stasiland brings us extraordinary tales of real lives in the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who tried to escape to West Berlin as a sixteen-year-old; hears the heartbreaking story of Frau Paul, who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall; and gets drunk with the legendary "Mik Jegger of the East," once declared by the authorities--to his face--"no longer to exist." And she meets the Stasi men themselves, still proud of their surveillance methods. Funder's powerful account of that brutal world has become a contemporary classic.

Funder, Anna

Anna Funder's international bestseller, Stasiland, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Her debut novel, All That I Am, has won many prizes, including the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award. Anna Funder lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and children.