Aftertime is the story of a young woman's struggle to come to grips with the aftermath of a devastating catastrophe. In her last year at the university in Kiev and shortly before she is to take her final examinations, the narrator is persuaded by her roommate to go for a cruise on a large lake north of the city. While her friends dance in the ballroom below ship, the young woman stands on deck, enjoying the tranquil evening. Sixty miles away, a nuclear reactor explodes. In the days that follow, the official version of events minimizes the risks. Conflicting instructions are issued;...
Aftertime is the story of a young woman's struggle to come to grips with the aftermath of a devastating catastrophe. In her last year at the unive...
What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person -- or a nation -- confront such a shock? From 1990 to 1993, at an unparalleled moment in German history, Olaf Georg Klein interviewed almost a hundred fellow former East German citizens, probing their experiences of the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic, then crafting that material into twelve first-person narratives. The result is a literary account whose narrators include representatives from the cities and the countryside, from...
What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person -- or ...