The Living Realm

In this slim but expansive novel from an award-winning playwright, a British archaeologist living in Berlin begins to see his dead lovers in a cruising forest on the city's outskirts, causing him to question the nature of time and his own state of mind.

While cruising one evening in a forest by Teufelssee, a small glacial lake in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin, a man spots a beautiful stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to his long-dead lover. It’s impossible: Lukas died of AIDS nearly thirty years ago. Yet the man knows what he saw. And then, as summer carries on, he begins to see others.

His chosen family of best friends, Gabor and Birgit, grow progressively worried. The three of them continue their summer by the lake, swimming, crushing on strangers, talking politics, and observing their beloved Elsa, a boar who lives in the neighboring forest. Yet the narrator of Jordan Tannahill’s novel becomes increasingly unmoored. As he attempts to understand what’s happening to him—and learns more about Teufelssee’s mysterious history—he finds himself venturing farther into the forest, and begins to question not just his sanity but the nature of time itself and his own place within its flow of human, animal, and geological life.

An openhearted meditation on memory, queerness, desire, and death, and written with the lyricism and erudition that have made Tannahill an internationally celebrated playwright, The Living Realm is a slim novel of epic feeling, and an elegy to living with purpose.