Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Müggelsee, at the city’s bucolic border, where the differences between East and West have not yet faded and strange encounters with men from the vanished republic are still a part of daily life. But there, Wolf finds himself increasingly strained by the triviality of his daily routine with Alina. The monotony of life in their comfortable apartment gives way, however, when an old girlfriend surfaces and Wolf escapes his boredom into a torrid affair. As Wolf’s struggle with his infidelity grows, so grows the hell of his concealment.

Called “a grand master of his craft” by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and “among the best and brightest that contemporary German literature has to offer” by Fuldaer Zeitung, Ralf Rothmann is one of Germany’s most gifted writers. Fire Doesn’t Burn is a dark recasting of the delicate reunification of East and West as a chronicle of erotic desire and an extraordinary rediscovery of emotion and place.

“Fire Doesn’t Burn is intense and tragic, and unquestionably Rothmann’s most personal work.”—Peter Mohr,