The Borderless Book Club in Berlin

Our July book takes us to the Irish coast, where the sea becomes much more than a landscape...
This month, we will immerse ourselves in a novel about memory, loss, and the mysterious ways in which the past shapes who we are.
With lyrical prose, haunting reflections, and an atmosphere that feels both intimate and dreamlike,
The Sea invites us to explore the fragile boundaries between childhood and adulthood, love and grief, memory and reality.

### About the book

After the death of his wife, Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he spent a formative summer as a child. Hoping to find solace, he instead finds himself overwhelmed by memories of the Grace family, whose elegance, secrets, and tragic fate left an indelible mark on his young life.
As past and present intertwine, Max confronts love, loss, desire, and the elusive nature of memory. Through his recollections, the novel becomes a meditation on how we remember our lives—and how those memories can comfort, deceive, and transform us.
Beautifully written and deeply moving, The Sea is less about what happened than about how we carry the echoes of what has been.

### About the author

John Banville, born in 1945 in Wexford, Ireland, is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in the English language. Renowned for the elegance and precision of his prose, Banville has built a distinguished literary career exploring memory, identity, art, and the complexities of human consciousness.
His novels are admired for their psychological depth and richly poetic language, often blurring the line between reality and recollection. In 2005, The Sea received the prestigious Booker Prize, confirming Banville's place among the leading voices of modern literature.
Alongside his literary fiction, Banville has also written acclaimed crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black. Throughout his work, he demonstrates an extraordinary ability to transform ordinary experiences into profound reflections on time, beauty, and the human condition.

An undefined, unnamed war-torn country, a wife sitting next to her husband, lying in a coma.
A monologue, deep, yet spare, almost to the bone.
Hard topics, love and blame. Life...
That's what our short August novel might bring.

About the book
The story follows a woman who cares for her husband, lying in a coma after being wounded. As she sits beside him, she begins to speak openly for the first time, revealing her deepest thoughts, pain, and secrets. She treats him like a “patience stone,” a mythical object that absorbs suffering, and through her confessions, she gradually finds her own voice and a sense of liberation.

About the author
Atiq Rahimi was born in 1962 in Kabul, he later moved to France, where he continued his work as both a writer and filmmaker. He writes in both Dari (Persian) and French, and his work often explores themes related to war, identity, and the struggles of individuals—especially women—in Afghan society.
Rahimi’s writing style is typically minimalist and poetic, focusing on emotional intensity rather than complex plots. His storytelling is often intimate and symbolic, using simple language to convey deep psychological and political meaning. In addition to The Patience Stone, he is also known for other acclaimed works like Earth and Ashes and for adapting his novel A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear into a film

That moment of the book club history just came...
We get into a Family Saga!
For this meeting, we travel across Korea and Japan through a sweeping story about migration, resilience, and identity.
Pachinko invites us to explore how history shapes individual lives and how families carry both the burdens and the hopes of the generations that came before them.
Through intimate personal stories set against the backdrop of major historical upheavals, the novel asks a powerful question: how do ordinary people preserve dignity, love, and belonging when the world around them constantly denies them a place?

About the Book
The story begins in early 20th-century Korea with Sunja, the beloved daughter of a poor but proud family living in a small fishing village. After an unexpected pregnancy threatens her future, she accepts a marriage proposal from a kind minister and moves to Japan, beginning a life marked by hardship, sacrifice, and perseverance.

The novel follows four generations of Sunja’s family as they struggle to build lives in a country that treats them as outsiders.
Facing discrimination, poverty, war, and social exclusion, each generation must confront difficult choices about identity, survival, and belonging.
Spanning decades and moving between Korea and Japan, Pachinko weaves together themes of family loyalty, cultural displacement, and the quiet courage required to endure history.

About the Author
Min Jin Lee is a Korean-American writer known for her powerful explorations of migration, identity, and the experiences of the Korean diaspora.
Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a child, and she later studied history at Yale University before pursuing a career in writing.

Curiosities
Lee spent years researching the history of Koreans living in Japan while writing Pachinko, conducting interviews and studying the social realities of the community.
Pachinko became an international bestseller and has been adapted into a television series by Apple TV+, bringing the story to an even wider global audience.

Upon request, we will go back to our April Book Selection and have a second chance to discuss it!
Let's delve into Rushdie’s “largest aesthetic achievement,” according to Harold Bloom and what scholars describe as fundamentally a study of alienation and hybrid identity: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

About the Book
The Satanic Verses is a complex, magical-realist novel that intertwines multiple storylines involving two Indian expatriates — Gibreel Farishta, a famous Bollywood actor, and Saladin Chamcha, an immigrant voice actor in Britain — who survive the mid-air bombing of a hijacked plane and fall into a surreal fantasy world. Their experiences blur dream and reality, exploring altered identities, spiritual visions, and personal transformations. One of the key narratives involves a mythical city and a prophet figure named Mahound, whose revealed “verses” and tribal conflicts echo and reimagine early Islamic history in dream sequences that question faith, revelation, and authority.

About the Author
Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and essayist, born in 1947 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.
He was educated in England and he rose to international prominence with Midnight’s Children (1981), a landmark novel combining history and magical realism to depict India’s post-independence experience; it won the Booker Prize and is considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century.
Rushdie is known for his imaginative prose, layered narratives, and exploration of themes such as identity, migration, cultural hybridity, and freedom of expression.
His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses brought worldwide attention and controversy, significantly affecting his life and career.
Despite these challenges, he has continued to produce acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, including The Moor’s Last Sigh, Shalimar the Clown, and the memoir Knife (2023), and is widely regarded as a major figure in contemporary world literature.