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From an internationally acclaimed, multi award-winning author: this is a story of love and betrayal set in Berlin during the years before and after the fall of the Wall.
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.
From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
Paperback Published 21 May 2024 304 pages
"One of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read… Erpenbeck never reaches for the stock phrase or the known response…[her] rigorous and uncompromising imagination is invigorating all the way to the final page."― Natasha Walter, The Guardian
"The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies."― Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement
"The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies."― Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement