“Capturing a lost generation that feels both timeless and particular in its ironic fatalism and its various intellectual, artistic, and political responses to a broken world, this novel will be of interest to the international literary community. A striking debut from a new global voice.” — Kirkus Review (Starred)

“Berlin Atomized is the world bridged, coupled, and made fast — by the latest lost generation and by Julia Kornberg’s border-and-genre-crossing talent, as restless as a flame.” — Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Jewish Book Award-winning The Netanyahus

“A punk song of lost innocence and the madness of history, this brilliant debut brings a new name, and a potent style, to the table: Julia Kornberg.” — Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral

“Remarkable, tender, funny…[Berlin Atomized is] a novel in fragments floating in the great events of immanent youth.” — Pola Oloixarac, author of Mona

“Ironic and always brilliant, tender and at the same time ruthless, with dazzling intelligence and whip-like sentences that showcase truth in every paragraph, this novel by Julia Kornberg imagines, invokes and exorcises the ghosts of her generation.” — Federico Falco, author of A Perfect Cemetery

“Argentine writer Kornberg debuts with an evocative portrait of disaffected youth and an unsettling, war-torn near future . . . Readers will look forward to seeing what Kornberg does next.” — Publishers Weekly

“A slyly adventurous book with markings of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad… Berlin Atomised constantly surprises and charms.” — Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“Berlin Atomized is a globetrotting romp, a contra-hegemonic assault on the bullshit of a decaying, cowardly bourgeoisie seeking comfort in a history that never quite ended and moving, even  harrowing bildungsroman.” — Federico Perelmuter, Full Stop

“Dizzying, funny, and irreverent.” — Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“Kornberg has written an incredibly ambitious novel about a topic that is changing in real time… The future of Kornberg as an author seems dazzingly bright, and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.” — Cory Oldweiler, Southwest Review

“[Kornberg] unflinchingly captures the horror, absurdity, and beauty of how it feels to be alive right now.” — Mikaela Dery, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Kornberg, not yet 30, is a burgeoning talent. Her flickering, unflinching prose, which she herself translate from the original Spanish, makes you feel the siblings’ despair on every page… The universe inside this book is not one any of us would want to spend time in – but Kornberg constructs and inhabits it with care and command.” — E. Kinney Zalesne, Moment Magazine

“Kornberg’s imaginative scope is wide . . . While exposition is doled out economically, the prose is exceptionally sharp . . . It’s the end of the world, and Kornberg’s electrified debut seems to hold with those who favor fire (with a side of flip-phone warfare).” — Ruth Weissman, The Berliner

” Exis­ten­tial and sad­ly prophet­ic, Berlin Atom­ized offers a glimpse of the loom­ing col­lapse we face and the per­sis­tence of the human desire to feel alive despite it . . . With a bit­ing voice, Korn­berg crafts an all-encom­pass­ing nar­ra­tive that tran­scends the bound­aries of the tra­di­tion­al nov­el. By the end, one feels the need to return to the begin­ning, as though to con­firm it is the same book that has unfold­ed all along.” — Jessica Ruetter, Jewish Book Council

“Berlin Atomized is an adventure story and a family drama, but in many ways it’s also a book about the internal and external chaos of growing up during globalization in an exploding, rootless world—one in which young people can’t tell who they are.” — Valerie Stivers, The Rumpus

“Berlin Atomized is beautifully and strangely built and slightly haunted. It’s a novel about people trying to assemble themselves from the pieces left behind. if you’ve never wondered what’s holding your fragments together, this one is a must-read.” — Jackie Pick

A kinetic, globetrotting novel following three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to 2034, as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century.

Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and repeating: “I am not asleep.”

She grows up partying and taking undeserved siestas, while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city’s powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the IDF.

Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working-class families. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, and their family scattered all over the earth.

The second half of the novel takes place between 2018 and 2035, invoking and imagining possible futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an undeclared war destroys the city, and Nina, after tracing Mateo’s last steps to his death in Tel Aviv, ends up in Berlin, where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history.

From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another. Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg’s napalm-ic debut—a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.