Pleasured (Harper)

Perhaps the best novel yet about the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ‘at once cinematic, intimate and epic’ (The Times) – from Granta Best of British novelist Philip Hensher, author of the bestselling The Mulberry Empire. 'Pleasured begins on New Year's Eve, 1988, when a car breaks down on a road connecting West Germany and West Berlin. Inside the car are an unlikely trio – Peter Picker, an Englishman, and the two strangers to whom he is giving a lift, a student who calls herself Daphne and Friedrich Kaiser. The novel tracks their intertwined fates in the year that follows. It is, of course, no ordinary year, and it is not only the Berlin Wall which has collapsed by its end… Distinctive and consistently appealing, Philip Hensher's novels are full of mysteries to be uncovered, lies to collapse, and secrets to be dramatically revealed.' Guardian