German writer Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann have won the International Booker prize for the novel Kairos.
In relentless, unflinching present tense sentences, punched on to the page, it explores the extent to which human hearts might rise above history. The book finds only fleeting and quickly crushed spaces for love to transcend all, however, as it plunges into the depths of interpersonal and social alienation and despair.
The book begins with a death. Katharina, in the present, learns of the long-expected (but no less shattering) demise of her one-time lover Hans. On receiving the news, she delves into an archive of records – letters, diaries, clippings – which memorialise their affair.
