While We Were Dreaming

Meyer’s 2007 debut, appearing in English for the first time, is a brilliant coming-of-age portrait of friendship and political change in East Germany. Streetwise Daniel Lenz and his loyal, doomed group of friends—Rico, a hotheaded boxer; Stefan, nicknamed Pitbull; Mark, whose drug use seals his fate early on; Little Walter, who is too small to fight but is a master thief; and Paul, whose truest love is porn—grow up in Leipzig in the years before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A series of mesmerizing, nonchronological vignettes depicts the boys’ early school years, when they pledged loyalty to socialism, through their teenage years and into young adulthood, periods marked by jail sentences, drug problems, and clashes with skinheads. Despite these hardened circumstances in the “rough part of town,” there are moments of joy, love, and innocence. (One of the boys “loves Mickey Mouse even though he’s pretty good at hot-wiring cars.”) Meyer’s sharp, hypnotic prose is deftly translated by Derbyshire, resulting in a grand mythology of youth that brims with complex and shifting allegiances, rivalries, rages, and deaths. This is both harrowing and compulsively readable. (Sept.)