George

About the book

It is one o’clock in the morning after a dinner with friends. George is analytical and solitary, past forty, and quietly bored by a life that runs like clockwork. He texts Lisa, a woman he met only hours earlier, and invites her to New York. She tells him he’s mad. A few weeks later they are sitting side by side on a plane.

What begins as an absurd thought experiment turns into a week of diners and hotel corridors, the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, runs through Central Park and a Broadway show they never quite get to. In long, sharp and often comic conversations, two very different people circle each other. Lisa seems to have everything under control, yet she carries a grief she has never been able to put down. George was called a freak as a boy and has always preferred watching life to living it. Now he has to decide whether to stay outside the picture or step into it.

George is a quiet, wry and unsparing novel about loneliness and closeness, about the stories we tell ourselves, and about the courage to let someone in.

The first novel about George. His story continues in «Emily» (German).