Simple stories

A heartbreaking and funny first novel from the author of 33 Moments of Happiness which makes us understand what life has been like since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Altenburg in Thuringia is a provincial flyspeck on the map of the new Germany. With laconic wit and a tenderness immune to sentimentality Schulze starts to tell us 'simple stories', in pitch-perfect prose reminiscent of Raymond Carver, about seemingly unconnected people. By the end, we know we have been listening to a novel in glittering fragments spun by a master - a complete tragicomedy of ordinary people in Nowheresville caught up in the last great cataclysm of the twentieth century.