The story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and
most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in
Sheerness, Kent in the 1970s.
Towards the end of 1974, a stranger arrived in the small town of
Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He could often be found
sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking lager and smoking
Gauloises while flicking through the pages of the Kent Evening Post.
Charles was the name he offered to his new acquaintances.
But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from
the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the
leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West
Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he
eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house
overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he
mean by detecting a moral utopia in a town that others, including his
concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to
deindustrialisation and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded
bombs?
Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months
before Johnson arrived, returns to the island that is all the world to
uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to
understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak
with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters
and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own island stories, the
book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European
Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens
out to provide an alternative version of modern British history: a
history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of
an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to
Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.