‘Beautiful, hugely ambitious’ GARTH GREENWELL

‘I devoured each page’ DOUGLAS STUART

‘Hypnotic’ TASH AW

The award-winning author of The Listeners, Jordan Tannahill, returns with a sublime, dreamlike novel of love, grief, history and cruising set in Berlin.

While cruising one evening by Teufelssee, a small glacial lake in the forest on the edge of Berlin, an aging expat spots a beautiful stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to his long-dead lover, Lukas. Lukas died of AIDs 30 years prior but his presence that night, whether doppelgänger or ghost or something else altogether, seems undeniable.

As the summer rolls on, the expat and his friends Gabor and Birgit, continue to unwind by the lake, swimming, crushing on strangers, talking politics and observing Elsa, a boar who lives on its fringes. But as yet more figures begin to appear, the expat 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 ever further into the forest. Soon he begins to question not just his sanity but the nature of time itself and his own place within its flow.

An openhearted meditation on memory, queerness, desire and death, written with extraordinary lyricism, The Living Realm is a slim novel of epic feeling, and an elegy to living with purpose.