East Berlin, 1986. One day in November, nineteen-year-old Katharina meets Hans on a bus, a writer in his fifties, married with a teenage son. They begin a complex and not necessarily idyllic love relationship. Meanwhile, the communist bloc begins to falter, and the GDR will eventually collapse, with the iconic image of the fall of the Wall. A time of hope opens, but also uncertainty. A time of anxiety and confusion, which each of the characters will experience in a very different way due to the difference in age that separates them. Running away from archetypes and clichés, Jenny Erpenbeck builds a love story full of ups and downs and not without manipulation and toxicity. At the same time, she traces a chronicle full of edges and nuances about a crucial moment of passage, in which a repressive but also protective society becomes a free but also aggressively competitive one.