Back cover: Two states, two eras, four lovers: the sweeping novel by bestselling author Karin Kalisa. Before Jon can finish school, it finishes with him. He's out. And Sunny, whom he longs for like he's never longed for anyone before, doesn't get in touch. Under the scorching sun of a record-breaking summer, he wanders through the woods outside Berlin and stumbles upon the hidden buildings of the former East German youth academy—and upon Benno, who once found the love of his life here, Alemee from Ethiopia, and was stripped of his citizenship because of this love. After many years in Africa, he has returned alone to a country that has become unfamiliar to him. Jon and Benno become companions who help each other avoid seeing their lives as slippery slopes. Sunny and Alemee, around whom his thoughts constantly revolve, blend into the dazzling present like mirages on the horizon of a frozen time. But then a battered Japanese Jeep, freshly brewed coffee from Sidamo, and a few incredibly fortunate bureaucratic errors by the Berlin authorities suddenly set everything in motion that seemed stuck. Highly topical and at the same time a sounding board into the era of world revolution—from Berlin to Addis Ababa and beyond. Karin Kalisa recounts the passages of a summer in which unprecedented heat blurs the line between reality and unreality. Completely real is her revealing look at the strange system of schools and at a little-known chapter of Germany's past. Biography: Karin Kalisa, born in 1965, has lived in Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Tokyo, and Vienna, and has resided in East Berlin for several years. As both a scholar and a writer, she explores Asian languages, philosophical concepts, and ethnological descriptions. "Sung's Shop" is her first novel. New product