Kairos
Germany

Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Love & Passion Historical Fiction 2023

Summary

In East Berlin in 1986, nineteen-year-old Katharina meets Hans, a married writer in his fifties, by chance on a bus. Drawn together by their shared passion for music, literature and art, they begin an intense affair that transforms both their lives. Initially filled with excitement and tenderness, their relationship gradually becomes increasingly controlling and destructive, as jealousy, manipulation and emotional cruelty undermine their intimacy. Meanwhile, the world around them is undergoing its own dramatic transformation. As the German Democratic Republic approaches collapse, the political ideals and certainties that have shaped their lives begin to crumble. Erpenbeck intertwines the deterioration of the couple’s relationship with the dissolution of East Germany, creating a powerful parallel between private disillusionment and national upheaval. Through precise, evocative prose, she examines the complicated relationship between love and power, the persistence of nostalgia, and the difficulty of recognising when devotion has become oppression. Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, Kairos is both an intimate portrait of a destructive relationship and a profound meditation on history, memory and the cost of holding on to the past

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Country
Germany
Europe
About the author
Jenny Erpenbeck
Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck is an acclaimed German novelist, playwright and opera director, born in East Berlin in 1967. She grew up in a family with a strong literary heritage: her grandfather was the physicist and philosopher Fritz Erpenbeck, and her grandmother was the writer Hedda Zinner. Before becoming a full-time writer, Erpenbeck trained as a bookbinder, worked as a theatre props manager and studied musical theatre direction. She subsequently built a successful career as an opera director before publishing her debut novella, The Old Child, in 1999. Her fiction frequently explores memory, displacement, political change and the ways history shapes individual lives. Her notable works include Visitation (2008), The End of Days (2012) and Go, Went, Gone (2015), a novel examining the experiences of African refugees in contemporary Germany. Erpenbeck received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015 for The End of Days. In 2024, she won the International Booker Prize for Kairos, translated from German by Michael Hofmann. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages and is widely recognised for its lyrical precision, philosophical depth and exploration of the relationship between private experience and historical upheaval.

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Details
Published
2023
Author
Jenny Erpenbeck