From the 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize, a collection of short essays on the places, people, rituals and objects that slip into the realm of memory. The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German parliament, is demolished. A grandmother's laughter passes from life into memory. Furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old ways are erased by the new. In this fascinating collection of essays, most of them written for her column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jenny Erpenbeck meditates, with a sense of both deep melancholy and wry humour, on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Whether recalling the shop that used to darn tights in the days before you could just buy a new pair, reflecting on changing social attitudes, or considering the mysterious vanishing of a piece of cheese from her fridge, Jenny Erpenbeck's sharp intelligence, eye for telling detail, and her nuanced perspective on her country's past and present imbue these brief pieces with lasting power.

Compact yet kaleidoscopic * Guardian *
Jenny Erpenbeck is an expert chronicler of this post-Wall era, from the highs and hopes of the 1990 to a pervasive Angst mode today... Erpenbeck applies her finely calibrated divining rod to chart that story down the decades * Financial Times *
I enjoyed Erpenbeck's quirky reflections... Melancholy wisdom * Independent *
In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate -- Mary Costello
Meditative, moving and profoundly beautiful -- Edmund de Waal
Beautifully minimalist * Gloss *
Few writers could find such feeling in a book about nothingness * Observer *
The most accessible and evocative chronicler of post-Wall Germany... Erpenbeck's experience of impermanence captures the anxious undertow and reluctant trade-offs of urban modernity * New Statesman *
Here is a writer who has seen things fall apart, only to live through further false promises... Beals's translation is elegant and well-judged * Irish Times *
Sane, witty and wise. A nice bite-sized introduction to this important European writer

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017). as well as Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections (2020). In 2024, her novel Kairos was awarded the International Booker Prize. Her work is translated into over thirty languages. Kurt Beals is a translator and professor at the University of Richmond.