Prize-winning German writer Ingo Schulze's first novel, Simple Stories, is a marvel of storytelling and craft. Set in the East German town of Altenburg after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it deftly leaps among an array of confused characters caught in the crossroads of their country’s history: a lovelorn waitress who falls for a visiting West German investor; an art historian turned traveling salesman; a former Communist official plagued by his past; an unsuccessful writer who asks his neighbor to break his leg so that he can continue to live on welfare. Schulze skillfully intercuts an assortment of moving and comic vignettes about seemingly unconnected people, gradually linking them into an exhilarating whole of tidal unity and emotional force, until we see that all the time we have been reading a novel in glittering fragments, spun by a master. With a piercing eye for detail and a magical ear for dialogue, Schulze portrays the tragi-comedy of ordinary...

In this wonderfully humorous and deceptively simple love story, Ingo Schulze upends our expectations from the get-go.It is 1989 in East Germany. Adam is a tailor and dressmaker living in his own Garden of Eden in East Germany, where he leads a life of dressing--and undressing--his appreciative clientele. Evelyn is a restless young waitress who, having just unexpectedly quit her job, returns home to find Adam with one of his customers.The snake having reared its ugly head, Evelyn packs her belongings and runs off to Hungary with friends. When Adam banishes himself from the safe confines of his home, his garden, and his livelihood in pursuit of Evelyn, this Fall of Man coincides with the beginnings of a much more contemporary Fall--a wobbling Hungary opening its borders to Austria, the wall in Berlin beginning to crack, and Adam and Evelyn swept out into the Western world on a human tide of eager refugees desperate to find new freedoms. Paradise Regained? Perhaps...

In his long-awaited new novel, renowned German author Ingo Schulze provides a rich and nuanced panorama of a world in transition.East Germany, January 1990. Enrico Türmer--man of the theater, aspiring novelist--has turned his back on the art world and joined a startup newspaper. Before long, the former aesthete and rebel becomes obsessed with personal gain, and in a series of letters to his sister, a friend, and a would-be lover, Enrico vividly muses on his capitalist ventures and latent worldly ambitions. As Schulze peels away the layers of Enrico's previous existence, his antihero's reinvention comes to embody all the questionable aspects not only of life in the old Germany, but of life in the Germany just taking form.From the Trade Paperback edition.