Edgar Selge: Jura’s Last Winter

“It doesn’t matter where we begin to practice trust: with ourselves or with others. We just have to start.”
Jura Ryabinkin is sixteen years old when he starves to death during the German Wehrmacht’s siege of Leningrad. He left behind a diary that the narrator of this novel reads over and over again, until he soon feels as though he knows the boy. Jura becomes a character in the novel, as does the narrator. Their encounter begins cautiously and grows ever closer as the story unfolds. A dialogue develops between the two about youth, dreams, literature, mothers, violence, alienation, and intimacy, and they reveal their most personal stories to one another.
Edgar Selge erects a memorial to a young man who was brutally murdered by the Nazis and brings him to life for his readers. A moving read, a book of boundless literary imagination.

“Edgar Selge has always reached and moved his audience—as a stage actor, as a TV detective, and now, at 73, as a writer,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung about Selge’s sensational literary debut, *Hast du uns endlich gefunden*.
On October 15, Edgar Selge will be a guest at the Schauspielhaus to discuss his second book, *Jura’s Last Winter* (publication date: September 4, 2026, by Rowohlt).

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Muriel Liebmann

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Muriel Liebmann

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