By making the predicament of the refugee banal and quotidian, Erpenbeck helps it become visible.' - Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Coetzee, whose flat, affectless prose wrests coherence from immense social turmoil. 'A highly sophisticated work.' - Kate Web, The Spectator The risk of didacticism is high, but the book’s rigor and crystalline insights pay off, aesthetically and morally.' - The New York Times 'This timely novel brings together a retired classics professor in Berlin and a group of African refugees. 'Beautifully haunting.' - Interview Magazine 'The plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor.Very moving.' - Carol Morely, Guardian Her economical prose lends existential significance to the most commonplace conversations, defined less by what they include than by what they omit.' - Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs Erpenbeck possesses an uncanny ability to portray the mundane interactions and routines that compose everyday life, which she elevates into an intimately moving meditation on one of the great issues of our times.

'This brilliantly understated novel traces with uncommon delicacy and depth the interior transformation of a retired German classicist named Richard. 'A retired widower and classics professor takes an interest in African migrants staging a hunger strike in Berlin and finds himself tumbling into a world of harrowing stories and men who share a common sense of loss.' - Boston Globe

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