Publisher's Synopsis
Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize
Longlisted for the 2022 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
Shortlisted for the 2022 Prix Femina étranger
November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they've harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father's car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it's with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all of poetry.
Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.
A brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun. A stellar achievement. - Will Ashon
With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the "Wenderoman" par excellence, the great novel of the "turn", as German reunification is called. -Christine Lecerf, Le Monde des livres
The Berlin of Star 111 wakes a longing for a city like no other. You want to linger there in the squatted Assel bar where workers, hookers and departing Soviet soldiers cross paths with anarchists full of ideas. - Frederique Fanchette, Liberation
