Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck's much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses & an old world evaporates

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...