Clemens Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle and now lives in Leipzig, both cities in what was East Germany. His studies at the German Literature Institute, Leipzig, were interrupted by a spell in a youth detention centre. He has worked as a security guard, forklift driver and construction worker. His debut While We Were Dreaming was published in 2006. All the Lights, his second book, won the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2008, and was first published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2011. His novels Bricks and Mortar and While We Were Dreaming have both been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Katy Derbyshire is a London-born translator who has lived in Berlin since 1996. She translates many contemporary German authors. Her translation of Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer won the 2018 Straelener Prize for Translation and both Bricks and Mortar and Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming were longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She also helped set up the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

‘Take the bare prose of Raymond Carver, apply the bleak outlook of Michel Houellebecq, place characters from an Irvine Welsh book on German streets, and you have something close to this collection of 15 short stories… His tales have an evanescent, impressionistic quality… Meyer thrills and rewards.’ Alex Rayner, The Guardian