A LOVE AFFAIR IN PYONGYANG

• Andreas Stichmann is unique in contemporary literature: an outstanding stylist, whose work connects pop and poetry, boldness of language and humour like no other writer.
• Recommended by New Books in German (Goethe Institute).
• Longlist for the 2022 German Book Prize.
  

A love story between two women, two ages, two systems.

Claudia Aebischer isn’t really used to strong feelings. As the head of a delegation of young creative artists, the fifty-year-old travels to Pyongyang for the last time to attend a big celebration for the opening of the German library there. But just outside the Chinese border, she finds herself confronted by someone who awakens an old longing in her. It’s an encounter that makes everything new and different – can that really happen? As Claudia finds out, the bolt from the blue has a name. Sunmi is an expert in German studies, and an interpreter and agent from North Korea.
When Andreas Stichmann returned from his trip to North Korea in 2017, he did not bring a literary report or a work of non-fiction back with him but instead an idea for a novel. Eine Liebe in Pjöngjang is more than a novel, it is an adventure. The unlikely story of a love affair between two women, two ages and two systems – and an affirmation of 19th century literature. Extremely funny and unusually beautiful, this book adopts the “foreign” like someone in love: suddenly, with abandon, blinded by the light of one’s own projections.

“Glimmering unfamiliarly like an alien stone that has landed with us, puzzling, but still a story about someone different from those of us who live here.” Matthias Nawrat