While We Were Dreaming
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Rico, Mark, Paul and Daniel were 13 when the Berlin Wall fell in autumn 1989. Growing up in Leipzig at the time of reunification, they dream of a better life somewhere beyond the brewery quarter. Every night they roam the streets, partying, rioting, running away from their fears, their parents and the future, fighting to exist, killing time. They drink, steal cars, feel wrecked, play it cool, longing for real love and true freedom. Startlingly raw and deeply moving, While We Were Dreaming is the extraordinary debut novel by one of Germany's most ambitious writers, full of passion, hope and despair.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Meyer's 2007 debut, appearing in English for the first time, is a brilliant coming-of-age portrait of friendship and political change in East Germany. Streetwise Daniel Lenz and his loyal, doomed group of friends—Rico, a hotheaded boxer; Stefan, nicknamed Pitbull; Mark, whose drug use seals his fate early on; Little Walter, who is too small to fight but is a master thief; and Paul, whose truest love is porn—grow up in Leipzig in the years before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A series of mesmerizing, nonchronological vignettes depicts the boys' early school years, when they pledged loyalty to socialism, through their teenage years and into young adulthood, periods marked by jail sentences, drug problems, and clashes with skinheads. Despite these hardened circumstances in the "rough part of town," there are moments of joy, love, and innocence. (One of the boys "loves Mickey Mouse even though he's pretty good at hot-wiring cars.") Meyer's sharp, hypnotic prose is deftly translated by Derbyshire, resulting in a grand mythology of youth that brims with complex and shifting allegiances, rivalries, rages, and deaths. This is both harrowing and compulsively readable.
