Kairos (Unabridged‪)‬

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

Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and 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 19-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his 50s 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, and then what comes after. 

In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears.