A doomed affair: Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck, reviewed

We all live with boundaries, but few of us feel that as keenly as Jenny Erpenbeck, who grew up in the Pankow district of East Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Wall. Now a leading novelist of a unified Germany, she explained several years ago that when the Wall came down in 1989 and the East German state collapsed (she was 22 at the time), a ‘border’ was created between two halves of her life. ‘Without this experience of transition, from one world to a very other one, I would probably never have started writing.’

Set in her old neighbourhood in the dying days of the GDR, her novel Kairos tells the story of the love affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a writer who’s 34 years older, married, with a teenage son.