After starting and failing to read to an end five different fiction books, seven in total (lockdown, work stress, general restlessness), I took a stab at this one. Admittedly, it is just over 100 pages, but I started at 8am and by 12 I was finished, with a break in between for breakfast.

A family escaped from the DDR. The mum and two teenage kids are waiting for the dad to come back from a business trip - ready to celebrate his promotion with a mussel feast. The time passes, but the dad does't arrive - and the more he's late, the more we learn about him; the more we learn about him the less we like him: tyrannical, unsympathetic, arrogant, abusive, even violent.

At breakfast, T and I argued over how to interpret it. She remembered reading it's supposed to be a critique of the West, or the East, or an allegory, East vs West. Judging by the author's quote on the publisher's site, it is the story of a revolution: ‘I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga.’ It's also 'just' a family portrait: convincing, detailed, heart-breaking.