There are parallels between the two books. I don’t regret buying it, although it wasn’t quite as good as Unterleuten (and if you haven’t read that, you really must). But I absolutely loved Juli Zeh’s Unterleuten and here was another one by her right under my nose. I really, really, did not need any more books at that point. Unusually for me with a German book (usually I travel there armed with a long list of must-reads) this was a spur-of the-moment purchase, a paperback picked up at a train station kiosk while changing trains in Osnabrück on the way home from the UK. But what does that do to a society? And if no-one’s even voting anymore, who’s running the show? This is a late capitalist, post-Brexit, post-Trump world that is uncomfortably close to home. You can easily imagine a world where given the choice between keeping your vote and keeping your washing machine, most people will choose the latter. The protagonist and her best friend seem to want to stay out of politics. Die Zeit described it as a political pamphlet disguised as a thriller, and that certainly fits the bill. I suppose you could even read the poem as a sort of dystopian political thriller.īecause that is what Leere Herzen is. I’d forgotten that Braunschweig is Brunswick in English, but as soon as I remembered, the Pied Piper of Hamelin echoed in my head: “Hamelin town’s in Brunswick, by famous Hanover city…” That makes sense, as being led astray is a big part of both stories.

A bit like Black Mirror, perhaps.īut the location of this book couldn’t really be anywhere else but Germany, and a decent-sized city in Northern Germany at that. The year is not that far into the future, near enough that it could almost be now, but far away enough that it really couldn’t, at least one hopes not.

Empty Hearts by Juli Zeh