For Uwe Johnson, all of life is intensely political, so he chooses to place his fictional characters in the kind of moral dilemmas created by real political events. No Johnson character succeeds in living a truly private life, untouched by public concerns….

[Anniversaries] is a continuation of [his] prior themes—East vs. West, socialism vs. democracy, but in a new cadre that should finally win Johnson a larger American audience. This time he writes about a woman's choice to live in America, and in the very worst of political times.

Anniversaries is the story of a young German woman, Gesine Cresspahl (the same Gesine as in [Johnson's earlier novel] Speculations), and her ten-year-old daughter Marie (born of Gesine's affair with Jakob in Speculations), living on Riverside Drive in New York City. The novel takes the form of dated entries, each covering approximately a day of an eventful period...