The Cold Centre
About This Book
East Germany, in the last days of the Wall. A man gets an unsettling phone call from his ex-wife, who is in hospital waiting for a cancer diagnosis. He suddenly realizes he has to find out whether she was exposed to fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and he hurries back to the city. There he tries to piece together the events of a few days long ago and goes back over his own memories of working in the "cold centre", the air-conditioning plant of the East German Communist Party newspaper. Did she come into contact with a contaminated truck from the Ukraine? Was he just a cog at the heart of the system, one who failed to prevent a tragic accident? Can he learn the truth before it is too late? As his days in Berlin slip out of his control, he begins a desperate hunt for his bearings across a rupture in his own life that he has never recovered from. Inka Parei writes in her characteristically precise prose, and the book is built tightly and dizzyingly around the narrator's attempt to solve his own mystery. It offers a bleakly realistic picture of East Berlin before the Wall fell and a look at how people react to accidents, nuclear and otherwise. The English translation is by Katy Derbyshire.
ISBN: 9780857428318
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