It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a Gulag camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless hunger in a world where one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In this 2009 novel, Nobel Laureate Herta Müller conjures the distorted world of the Soviet labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity with poetic intensity and dispassionate precision. The Hunger Angel was based upon the based on the true story of the poet Oskar Pastior, who died before it was published.