WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024’An ambitious story of love and betrayal’ – Irish Times’The ending is like a bomb thrown into your room — you’ll be reeling for days and weeks to come.’ – Neel MukherjeeBerlin. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[68],"product_tag":[29107,328,69,26830,27011],"class_list":{"0":"post-103674","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","5":"product_cat-general-fiction","6":"product_tag-20th-century-c-1900-to-c-1999","7":"product_tag-fiction-in-translation","8":"product_tag-historical-fiction","9":"product_tag-modern-contemporary-fiction","10":"product_tag-narrative-theme-politics","11":"pa_book_author-erpenbeck-jenny","12":"pa_cover-paperback","13":"pa_dewey-833-92-edition23","14":"pa_edition-1st-paperback-ed","15":"pa_imprint-granta-books","16":"pa_language-english","17":"pa_pages-8473","18":"pa_publisher-granta-books","19":"pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","21":"first","22":"onbackorder","23":"taxable","24":"shipping-taxable","25":"purchasable","26":"product-type-simple"},"yoast_head":"\n