“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

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.