‘A prophecy, a warning, a love story, this is one of the best contemporary novels I have read in years.’ Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Upside-Down World
A woman looks back at the last summer she spent in Berlin – a successful writer in her youth, she left her beloved adopted home and never wrote again.
Fifty years earlier, a group of friends enjoy late summer in the city: Sam had left Haifa, Eimear had buried her parents in Derry, Alasne left her Basque Country home. All had made a life in a place that had for decades offered a home to artists and writers who had left – by will or by force — their homelands. Berlin was a place to enjoy freedom, but also to fall in love – with the city, with the beautiful stranger across from you at a reading.
But as autumn turns to winter, the world gets increasingly dark and crackdowns against artists and protestors increase, the group of friends are brutally reminded that tyranny comes in different forms, that a once-loved city can become very hostile indeed, and a place that was home can make you a stranger again.
As honest as it is devastating, Personal Weather is a story of loyalty and hope in the face of brutality and censorship. It is the story of love between two women, the love between loyal comrades, and the threads that keep us tethered in times of despair.
A woman looks back at the last summer she spent in Berlin – a successful writer in her youth, she left her beloved adopted home and never wrote again.
Fifty years earlier, a group of friends enjoy late summer in the city: Sam had left Haifa, Eimear had buried her parents in Derry, Alasne left her Basque Country home. All had made a life in a place that had for decades offered a home to artists and writers who had left – by will or by force — their homelands. Berlin was a place to enjoy freedom, but also to fall in love – with the city, with the beautiful stranger across from you at a reading.
But as autumn turns to winter, the world gets increasingly dark and crackdowns against artists and protestors increase, the group of friends are brutally reminded that tyranny comes in different forms, that a once-loved city can become very hostile indeed, and a place that was home can make you a stranger again.
As honest as it is devastating, Personal Weather is a story of loyalty and hope in the face of brutality and censorship. It is the story of love between two women, the love between loyal comrades, and the threads that keep us tethered in times of despair.
Reviews
Like Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, this novel tells of friends and lovers coming together and being pulled apart by the rising tides of fascism. Set among the ruins of the last capital of bohemia, it is a history of the present that shows that the old cliche is true: the personal is political, and what comes for one-for Yugoslavia, for Palestine-will come for everyone else in the end. A prophecy, a warning, a love story, this is one of the best contemporary novels I have read in years.