Kairos | Jenny Erpenbeck

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.