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Title details for Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck - Available

Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck
Lisa Flanagan
Audiobook
47 of 47 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
47 of 47 copies available
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024
'An ambitious story of love and betrayal' - Irish Times
'The ending is like a bomb thrown into your room — you'll be reeling for days and weeks to come.' - Neel Mukherjee
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 1, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781004181476
      • File size: 300062 KB
      • Duration: 10:25:07

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 6, 2023
      Erpenbeck (Go, Went, Gone) sets the dissolution of a May-December romance against the backdrop of German reunification in her solemn and subtle latest. After a former lover dies in the present day, Katharina receives two boxes of diaries, tapes, and souvenirs that chronicle their relationship from decades earlier. Erpenbeck then flashes back to 1986, when Katharina, as a 19-year-old student in East Berlin, starts an affair with Hans, a married writer. The relationship is intense, physically and emotionally, especially after she admits to a brief fling with a younger man. Now, while listening to Hans’s tapes, Katharina reckons with the depth of Hans’s sexual and psychological control over her life (“So far as I am concerned, your deception is the greatest and most critical defeat of my life,” he says to her on one of the vitriolic recordings). Their relationship is marked by the tension between beginnings and endings, love and hate, truth and deception, freedom and repression. It’s also a struggle of wills between two generations with a very different experience of the crumbling Socialist state. This audacious dissection of unruly forces demonstrates how endings are already present in every personal or political beginning, however promising.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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