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Kairos

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Kairos

By: Jenny Erpenbeck
Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
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About this listen

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, fueled 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.

©2023 Jenny Erpenbeck (P)2023 New Directions Publishing Corp. Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction World Literature
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Eloquent story of an East German couple struggling and failing to possess each other. Set in GDR as it reaches its dissolution. Fascinating. Replete with lies, hypocrisy, self-deception, self-delusion and ideological cant and control. some of the finest writing I’ve ever read. 💕

Politics made personal: a refined psychological drama 🎭

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Don't know why this won the international booker prize, I saw somewhere it's supposed to be an allegory for east vs west but omg what a boring story about 2 protagonists who have no redeeming features. The teen woman is just stupid & young. But the middle aged man whose a decade older than her own father is dull, boorish, self absorbed, a serial cheater, petty, jealous, a married man who has no intention of leaving his wife, in fact he's a dirty old selfish man with no redeeming features and is proof that old fellas going out with teens just hold them back. He clingy, whiney, whinging, self obsessed, reprehensible, and a grudging, covetous, bitter asshat. And predictably she becomes bi-sexual. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Am sorry I persevered!

Sorry I preserved

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On and on and on and going nowhere. Immeasurably boring. It had been so well-received…

I’m couldn’t get through this

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