Welcome to Litsy!

This is a soft pick. It is incredibly well written, in parts it was over my head with cultural & historical references, sometimes fascinatingly so & sometimes it began to feel too much & meaningless. It did some truly interesting things with form in the second half of the book - with repetition & alternating pov between paragraphs - giving you real time variances between the two protagonists. But the relationship! I felt so disturbed ⬇️

You, the gentrifier, have now been gentrified.... once every ten years, you should have a reunion and bitterly reminisce, clutching your paper cups of Moscow mule and growling about how this town's landlords and businesses put cash before community. At the end of the evening you should stand in a long line, in the order that your spending powers evolved to claim the city

A love affair that goes sour against the backdrop of the tumult of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The landscape of their relationship is mirrored in the political landscape of the time - tense, contentious, fragile, and fractured. Definitely a unique read and was wholly engaging. The writing style is engrossing.

Before they leave, you meet them for coffee and you understand then that they were always wary of Berlin, that they never committed themselves to a city that in turn never really committed to them. For all the talk of people ignoring each other at the end of relationships, it's Berlin which is the true ghost, drawing you in with a flurry of wild promises, and then abruptly losing interest.

Wow. Painful, real, an actual true account of what happens to women after war. Couldn‘t put it down but happy to finish.

Behold! My very first #BookSpin list! So excited about joining this challenge this year!!

This was a very interesting story of a Jewish passport forger in Nazi Berlin. It is well written, so well that sometimes the funny and eventful story covered the terror of being captured. I‘m torn between this is a good thing and the necessary seriousness is missing.

Some tougher reading after Christmas. It is written in a flowing style so far.

This deeply affecting novel follows an older couple who decide to undertake their own small campaign of resistance against the Nazi regime in 1940s Berlin. Otto and Anna leave postcards throughout the city, hoping to inspire others to resist. They are not particularly heroic and their efforts are almost entirely ineffectual, yet their decision to choose decency over the vile corruption around them is ultimately incredibly powerful. Unforgettable.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”