User:LambsC/Manja (novel)

'Manja' is a 1938 novel by the Austrian author and playwright Anna Gmeyner. It was first published as ''Manja. Ein Roman um fünf Kinder'' in Amsterdam, before being translated into English by Philip Owens. The novel was published in the UK and USA in 1939 as The Wall, and Five Destinies respectively. Reprinted in German in 1984 by Persona-Verlag, an English edition translated by Kate Philips was published by Persephone Books in 2002.

The novel follows the lives of five children and their families as they negotiate life in Nazi Germany and depicts the conflicting political ideologies of the time. Gmeyner opens by describing a spring night in 1920, the night of the conception of her five protagonists. These scenes of conception range dramatically, each exposing the harshness, bitterness, or tenderness of the couples in question. Heini's parents are reunited with a love and passion that bonds their family together throughout the novel, while Franz is conceived as a result of marital rape during which his mother, Frieda, hopes desperately she will not fall pregnant and considers inducing a miscarriage.

Gmeyner wrote Manja while living in Belsize Park, North London. Eva Ibbotson drew on this period of her mother's life in her novel The Morning Gift. .

Manja was published in the UK in September 1939, shortly after Britain declared war on Germany marking the beginning of WWII.