Excited to have read this in advance of its long listing for the booker international. I enjoyed this immensely and it’s well-deserved.

The premise of this book was very interesting to me, but I found the style hard to read. The pace of the characters' actions is breathtaking. The scenes veer from one place to another and it is like being in a high speed chase. Clemens Meyer has created an interesting world of dysfunctional people, but his prose reminds me of James Joyce - brilliant but difficult to access.

While We Were Dreaming is an episodic novel about teenagers in Leipzig after the fall of the Berlin Wall, whose lives are filled with drink, violence, and carjacking, and a certain hopelessness amongst their dreams. Told from the perspective of Daniel, the book follows him and friends like Rico, Mark, Paul, Daniel, Walter, and Stefan as they, at various ages, get in trouble, scheme, rage, and explore the version of Germany they now live in post-reunification.

This is a long book split into shorter sections of varying lengths that follow particular episodes in Daniel's life, moving backwards and forwards in time between these parts, but you quickly pick up the key characters, settings, and happenings. The way these parts are woven together builds up a story in a non-linear way, of hope and violence, police and the constant threat of imprisonment, and the importance of their friendships, even when things are bad, and though it sounds like it could be confusing, it does feel like a complete book by the end, but it also takes a lot of time to get there.

The book feels similar to books like Young Mungo or Who They Was in that it presents a violent youthful world in a literary way, but in the case of While We Were Dreaming, which is translated from German, it has has a very specific sense of time and place, and the aftermath of a divided country and extreme politics. I found it could be too slow for me at times and the length was off-putting considering that it doesn't really have much of a narrative (or at least not a linear one you can discern whilst reading), but the setting was fascinating and it makes for a distinctive coming of age novel.