Shortlisted for the German Book Prize
Nominated for the Swiss Book Prize
“This is a novel obsessed not with sugar but with abjection, uncertainty, creative groping, provisionality, desire and pleasure.…[The narrator’s] research uncovers the link between production and oppression; her notebook, however, comprises ‘dark whirlpools, in which everything, including everything peripheral, swirls with deafening noise forever around an unstable center.…The sugar factory is perhaps her own turbulent mind.” —On the Seawall
“A fascinating perspective on the workings of global capitalism…The book’s dot-joining approach might seem strange or avant-garde; but there’s nothing all that odd about Out of the Sugar Factory. If anything, Elmiger has found a way to describe something fundamental that gets overlooked, both because it’s so ingrained that it passes unnoticed and because you literally can’t see it.” —review31
“This book has a way of dissolving into and altering your thoughts, much like sugar in coffee.…the text echoes the way we think and remember, the ways we make connections between disparate objects in order to at least approach understanding.” —Asymptote
“Out of the Sugar Factory is an incredibly compelling quest for meaning and companionship through borrowed stories, unorthodox biographies, parallel lives. Weaving her own experiences—and fictions—with those of the unreliable narrators of history, Elmiger builds a narrative that is more than the sum of its parts. The book is hungry, insatiable actually, approaching what she calls "boundlessness"...it probes the limits of individual life and expands what can be done with language, driven by the kind of illogic that gets us closest to truth. This is mysticism for today.” —Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape
“Out of the Sugar Factory is W. G. Sebald meets Agatha Christie, with a remarkable touch all Elmiger's own. One of Switzerland's most promising young writers reminds us that history itself is one great, sordid mystery that must be continually reinvestigated, even if it can't be solved." —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Visitors
“Out of the Sugar Factory is liberated from the corset of the novel, a celebration of storytelling, a daring expedition into the economy of power and desire and into the abysses of our collective phantasms. Elmiger is a poet, historian, analyst, theorist, and gifted storyteller all in one. Few books are are beautiful, as intelligent, as profound and playful, and on top of that, as brilliantly written as Out of the Sugar Factory.” —Martina Süess, WOZ
“It is already clear that Out of the Sugar Factory will be one of this year’s most important books. This is because it delves into pressing issues, but deals with them in a hallucinatory way. And because of the precision and luminous beauty of her language.” —Annie-Sophie Scholl, Die Zeit
