I
love the East Berlin setting of this book, just before and after the Wall comes
done. It’s perfect for an intense, melancholy love story between a young woman in
her late teens and a married writer who is older than the young woman’s
parents.
As I read the book, I couldn’t help comparing their rocky relationship
to the state of East and West Germany and how things were so contentious back
then, even after reunification. I was also a college student in the late 1980s
and related to the idealism of the young woman during the end of the Cold War.
I didn’t travel to Berlin back then, but did go to the Soviet Union, Budapest,
and Prague. That era is gone, but lives on in this book.
Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos-an unforgettably compelling masterpiece-tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the…
This
is a heartening story of a beekeeper who is one of the few remaining residents
of his town after war breaks out.
He refuses to leave because of his bees, even
though his food supplies are running out. This book shows the devastation of
war and is of course so timely with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I’ve found I’m drawn to books about nature more than ever—because of climate
change, the pandemic, and war—and this one shows we’re all more alike than
different.
With a warm yet political humor, Ukraine’s most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict.
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under constant threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take…
Hong
Kong is my favorite city and I spent most of my 20s studying and working there.
I thought I knew a lot about its history, but this book shows that it’s much
more layered than one may think.
Yes, Hong Kong was a colonial city, but it was
mainly built by people who came to East Asia from the Middle East and India. I
think books like this are more important than ever because people are so quick
to look at history in black and white terms, but like Hong Kong, there many
more people involved in making a cosmopolitan city: Parsees, Jews, Muslim,
Hindus, and Eurasians from Macau.
A timely, well-researched, and “illuminating” (The New York Times Book Review) new history of Hong Kong that reveals the untold stories of the diverse peoples who have made it a multicultural world metropolis—and whose freedoms are endangered today.
Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a melting pot of diverse populations from around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.…
Bernardine
Szold Fritz was a Jewish woman from Peoria, Illinois, who moved to Shanghai in
1929 to marry her fourth husband. She was only thirty-three years-old. When she
realized her husband wasn’t the man he’d advertised, Bernardine could have left
him and Shanghai. Instead, she opened her home to Chinese and expat writers,
actors, musicians, and dancers, bringing them together in ways that had never
been seen before in Shanghai. When she could not accommodate everyone who
wished to attend her salon, she started a theater company and went on to
produce plays, ballets, and musical concerts, all while civil war broke out and
War War II brewed on the horizon.
