Unexploded Ordnance

WINNER OF THE 2023 RESTLESS BOOKS PRIZE FOR NEW IMMIGRANT WRITING

In imaginative prose that interrogates the past with a poet’s curiosity and a scientist’s pen, Unexploded Ordnance seeks to answer how we are shaped by the stories we inherit. 

After moving from Germany to the US to work as a professor of biology, Catharina Coenen takes up residence in a second language to voice the questions she could not ask at home. To what extent was her grandfather implicated in World War II? What exactly did her grandmother, mother, and aunt live through? And why are women’s wartime stories so seldom told? Coenen peels back generational silences to walk alongside her grandmother, who comes of age during Hitler’s rise to power, watches friends disappear one by one, and flees bombing raids with her tiny daughters. Weaving reflections on language, biology, queerness, art, and memory, Coenen moves between the personal and the universal with stunning honesty and elegance.