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Kairos

Written by: Jenny Erpenbeck
Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
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Publisher's Summary

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.
©2021, 2023 Penguin Verlag, Munchen; Michael Hofmann (P)2023 New Directions Publishing Corp.
Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Romance
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What listeners say about Kairos

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Profile Image for Drlaurel

Dark story of an abusive relationship set in East Berlin

Interesting premise but very difficult and turgid. I was happy it was over. Narrator had a very sleepy delivery of horribly abusive language and behaviour

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Profile Image for owenca

A tough read at times, lightened by performance

This is the story of a May-December romance, which is increasingly toxic, and the dissolution of the GDR. It drags at times with Hans’ increasing attempts to control Katerina. But the ending is excellent, with a surprise twist that makes Katerina rethink the “honesty” demanded by her lover. Did he ever really know her?

A parallel meaning - although the GDR did much to control its citizens, did it ever understand their desires?

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