About the author
Jenny Erpenbeck is a German novelist and opera director. Her fiction often places private memory inside larger historical breaks, asking what remains when a state, a home, a relationship, or an accepted version of events disappears.
Translated from German by Michael Hofmann, Kairos joins personal and national collapse without making one a simple symbol for the other. Jenny Erpenbeck builds the novel from letters, tapes, memory, and repetition: the materials people leave behind when a shared reality no longer holds.
Where to start
Start with Kairos. A chance meeting in 1980s East Berlin begins an affair whose tenderness and coercion unfold alongside the final years of the German Democratic Republic.
