Erpenbeck, Jenny – The Bell Bookshop

Things That Disappear

Emma — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German parliament, is demolished. A grandmother's laughter passes from life into memory. Furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old ways are erased by the new. In this fascinating collection of essays, most of them written for her column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jenny Erpenbeck meditates, with a sense of both deep melancholy and wry humour, on the disappearance and impermanence of things.

Kairos

Emma — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

‘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 MukherjeeBerlin. 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.

Kairos

Emma — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000