I Keep My Shadow Light: A Berlin Novel
"I was laughing out loud. I can recommend it whether you're a Berliner, a migrant, neither or both." - Louisa McDonnell
For fans of White Teeth, Leaving the Atocha Station, and Perfection.
Berlin: Europe's promised city. But like many new arrivals, Maeve is struggling to get the basics down. No permanent home. No job. No lasting romance or reliable friendships. Just the arms of the German state, sweeping her into its heady, bureaucratic embrace.
On her first day of a state-funded Integrationskurs - a requirement for her unemployment benefits - Maeve meets Zehra, Viktor and Karam. Four lost and lonely twenty-somethings, newly arrived in big bad Berlin, brought together by a system that wants to make them useful.
Over seven months, this class of migrants and misfits will grow together and fall apart as they are pushed to assimilate and learn the language to get a job. We witness police barging into the classroom, a racist supply teacher, a troubled classmate with PTSD, and tense debates about whether 'women are best suited to placing the flowers on a table'.
Despite the revolving door of classmates and supply teachers, the course offers Maeve a sense of grounding, community, and unlikely friendships with her classmates.
The story expands beyond the classroom, into a dysfunctional shared flat, bars, the good old Jobcenter, toilet cubicles, freezing living rooms, and then just roams around the streets, spinning out into something.
I Keep My Shadow Light is a darkly funny social commentary novel about identity, which asks, "What does it mean to belong, and what do you lose in trying?"
Perfect for readers of: Zadie Smith - Jenny Erpenbeck - Ben Lerner - Andrey Kurkov - literary fiction set in Europe - Berlin fiction - immigration fiction
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