IN THE BEE-LIGHT

Georg Klein’s stories draw on the places in which they are rooted: some invoke the aura of the big wide world, like the gates of the Berlin Chancellery and a spectacularly beautiful beach in California. Others revolve around spatial confinement, like the windowless wet room in the basement of a terraced house.
Work, to the protagonists of these stories, means nothing less than home. One elderly character runs the village forge, another restores damaged modern paintings, another organises an evening of folk music in the function room of an East German pub. The arts – lowbrow as well as highbrow – help create a touching sense of comfort and home. Art not only represents home, however: it also contains the seeds of adventure. And so we set off on a ghost hunt at a former paper factory, weave between the wooden columns of Germany’s first motorway church, and walk beneath the leafy crown of a mysteriously fruitful walnut tree: into the “bee-light” between home and adventure.

“You won’t want to trust this supposedly old-fashioned storyteller an inch. And yet you’ll devour his books with delight.” Ronald Pohl, Der Standard
“A unique author who has no intention of fitting neatly into familiar, popular categories.” Le Figaro