In West Berlin in 1989, eighteen-year-old Ralf has just left school and is living a final golden summer with his three best friends. They spend their days swimming, smoking and daydreaming about the future, oblivious to the storm gathering on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But an unsettling discovery about his family and a meeting with the mysterious Oz shatters everything Ralf thought he knew about love and loyalty. And as old Cold War tensions begin to tear his life apart, he finds himself caught up in a web of deceit, forced to make impossible choices about his country, his family and his heart.
Author
Ben Fergusson is an award-winning writer and translator. He was born in Southampton in 1980 and grew up near Didcot in Oxfordshire. He studied English Literature at Warwick University and Modern Languages at Bristol University and has worked as an editor, translator and publisher in London and Berlin. He currently teaches creative writing in Berlin and is a doctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia. Ben's debut novel, The Spring of Kasper Meier, won the 2015 Betty Trask Prize for an outstanding debut novel by a writer under 35 and the HWA Debut Crown 2015 for the best historical fiction debut of the year. It was also shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, while being selected for the Waterstone’s Book Club, WHSmith Fresh Talent and the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. The second and third books in Ben's Berlin trilogy are The Other Hoffmann Sister, published in 2017, and An Honest Man, published in 2019, which was selected by The Sunday Times, the TLS and the Financial Times as one of the best books of the year. In 2022, he will publish his first book of non-fiction, Tales from the Fatherland, an exploration of same-sex parenthood. Ben's short fiction has been twice longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and in 2020 he won the Seán O'Faoláin International Short Story Prize for his story 'A Navigable River'. He has translated numerous essays, poems and short stories from German for publishers internationally, including texts by Daniel Kehlmann, Alain Claude Sulzer, Byung-Chul Han and Antja Wagner and in 2020 won a Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation.
