Kairos: Winner of the International Booker Prize

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By Jenny Erpenbeck (Y), and and, Michael Hofmann
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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.
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Whitley Bay Book Group discussed Kairos in June 2025.
This book describes a toxic love story set in Berlin between a young woman and a much older man – which stands as a metaphor for the relationship between the East German state and its citizens. Like all of our best discussions, we had very different views on this book, ranging from those who would throw the book across the room to those who loved it and immediately sought out other books by the same author, with some of us changing our minds several times during the reading of it.
The notable differences in our responses seemed to be how important we judged the love story narrative to be compared to the East German / history narrative which most found interesting. Everyone hated Hans the controlling serial adulterer, and hoped he would get his come-uppance. Some found the early stages of the love affair and the love at first sight convincing, but some didn’t see any redeeming features in Hans especially as his behaviour deteriorated. There were also issues around style, with some of us finding it pretentious and incomprehensible in places and others poetic and descriptive.
Our average of 2.5 stars was made up of a range of 1 to 4.5, with one member attempting to award minus 10.