THE OTHERS by Sheena Kalayil

Elizabeth alerted me to this novel. And she is absolutely right - we are the BERLIN book club and it is always great (for me anyway) when my hometown of choice becomes the setting of a novel and even more so when the story told happens in the time and place I called home - the DDR. I love this chance to re-think and mull over.
The book got additional attention because it now is on the longlist of the Women‘s Prize of Fiction. The Manchester Review says about it:
„This novel tells the story of people pushed to the margins, othered, but who are shown with their dreams, beauty, and integrity intact. People who are attempting to carve out space for themselves in a changing, sometimes hostile world. Many of the elements at work during the collapse of the DDR – the uncertain status of immigrants, political and social instability, an under-threat welfare state – seem again to be of great relevance to us, today. But the truly human import of such weighty themes is, in this novel, enacted through things that are evergreen. Love, requited and unrequited, romantic and familial. Duty and obligation. Friendship. Hope. Loss. The things that bind, and the things that sunder.“
So let‘s see what we think about it!