Kairos By Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone & Visitation) is an epic storyteller $ arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 & then what comes after. In her unmistakable style & with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up & tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears.

As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East & West, & 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, & she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states & ideologies.”