INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024 Berlin, July 1986. Katharina and Hans meet by chance on a bus. She is a nineteen-year-old student, he is a married writer around fifty-five. They are surprised by the attraction that overwhelms them, something mutual and intense, something that gradually intensifies through their shared interest in music and art, something that inevitably deepens and binds them even more because this relationship must remain secret. Until she slips into a nocturnal misstep, he cannot forgive her, and a dangerous rift begins to form between them. Against the backdrop of the collapsing German Democratic Republic and the radical changes that followed, Jenny Erpenbeck, with her characteristic and penetrating language, speaks of the abyss of happiness, of the journey of two lovers on the brink of truth and falsehood, obsession and violence, hatred and hope. Everything in their lives, at the very moment it happens, transforms into something that has already been lost. The dividing line is always just a moment. The novel that was deservedly honored with the International Booker Prize 2024. "With her brilliant style, Jenny Erpenbeck highlights the complexity of the relationship between a young woman and a much older man, observing the daily tensions and subversive twists that mark the intimacy between them [...]. Here everything begins with enthusiasm and passion, yet it is also connected with power, art, and culture. The egocentric absorption of the two lovers in what is happening to them and subsequently the fall into a common destructive spiral are elements intertwined with the broader history of the German Democratic Republic during that period [...]. What makes Weather an unusual and rare narrative is that it is a novel that makes you feel both beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time, that it is a book both personal and political. The author leads readers to draw correlations between events that defined entire generations and a disastrous, stark love affair, while simultaneously raising questions about the nature of fate and free will. Like the GDR, this particular relationship begins with optimism and trust, but over time it unravels and disintegrates." From the rationale of the International Booker Prize 2024 jury