EMILY’S PICK

Girl meets older man. Passion, politics, and penetrating prose ensue. A book that makes me want to move to Berlin. -EW

An epic storyteller with the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, Jenny Erpenbeck has created an unforgettably compelling masterpiece withKairos.

The story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s: the passionate yet difficult long-running affair of Katharina and Hans hits the rocks as a whole worldthe socialist GDRmelts away. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: 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 Erpenbecks work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of his period between states and ideologies.

In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel.

Paperback | 304 pages | 5.40″ x 8.00″