Nearly a century of German political and social shifts are translated into human experience in Sacks’ new novel, starting with a 1933 prologue introducing young Klara von Arnsberg—“Narrow all over, sharp at the edges. Hard, a little cruel”—the daughter of a wealthy industrialist family. Klara’s betrayal of Max, her “clever and kind” Jewish friend, is just the first in a parade of horrors and harshnesses that will characterize this and subsequent generations featured in the ensuing 10 linked stories. “Rubble and Ruin” introduces Dorothea and Elsa, a pair of hungry and poor sisters in postwar Berlin, taking care of Dorothea’s baby, Oskar, the product of rape by Russian soldiers. Klara and Max reappear here too, revealing details of Max’s survival and Klara’s marriage to a brutish Nazi officer. Oskar’s adult life alongside a Turkish guest worker is explored in “Two Lives,” and in “Children of the Revolution,” Armin, one of Klara’s grandchildren, endures a miserable childhood in the 1970s, his feckless parents dabbling in drugs and subversive politics. There’s a pattern of unhappy children and unfeeling parents, like Ingo in “New Skins,” whose East German Stasi officer father denounced his own brother, and Ursula, a wartime friend of Klara’s in “The Fire,” whose father showed her no warmth while fondly recalling his time as a concentration camp guard. Klara’s “stone-cold heart” and reprehensible, murderous past recur frequently, her shadow falling over later stories featuring immigrants and the return of right-wing politics. Klara’s personification of the ills of the past and Sacks’ tendency toward the simple binary in her characters diminish the book’s impact, while Berlin is evoked as a flawed melting pot.