Description

Kairos is a 2021 novel by German author Jenny Erpenbeck. It received Germany’s Uwe Johnson Prize in 2022.[1] The English translation, by Michael Hofmann, published in the U.S. by New Directions and in the U.K. by Granta Books, was shortlisted for the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023[2] and won the International Booker Prize in 2024.

The novel tells the story of a doomed and increasingly toxic age-gap relationship, set against the backdrop of the collapse of the GDR, with the two lovers seemingly embodying East Germany’s crushed idealism.