What made me want to read this book in the first place was me being at the Leipzig Book Fair this year and hearing the author herself (who had just been awarded the debut Seraph, the most famous German prize for Fantasy/SciFi-Literature) read from it. After that it took me a while to get my hands on it because the publisher took an impolite amount of time to get the real book out. I just can't read on a screen without it feeling like work. This book has been called a Brexit-dystopia - and it kind of is, although I'd say that it isn't the main focus of the book. The world the story is set in is a future London where the rich and powerful have withdrawn to an inner circle of the city while the "outer rims" are places of exponentially growing danger and direpair - and there is "Miseria", a place where the victims of an epicemic that decimated the population noticably were conveniently stored to die. There are androids working alongside humans as their servants and assisstants, and there is total surveillance of the remaining population through the government and the pharma industry via braclets reading and transmitting biodata nonstop (a bit like all those fancy smartwatches, but of course nobody would use them that way in reality, would they?) and a ministry or two to help drag delinquents and sick people away from healthy society. So far, so dystopian. The main character, Richard, is a nobody living quite an uneventful and meaningless life in one of the inner outer rims. Until he is forced to take a new job - and then things get quite interesting for him. One of the things I enjoyed a lot about this book were the many references to other scifi literature as well as more "heavy" stuff such as Shakespeare. The later becomes especially important when Richard is brought int "Miseria" and confronted with a selection of Shakespeare-play-named characters of the human and android persuasion. If you knew your Shakespeare, you could often guess at the way a character would turn out. The book is full of clever (and sad) references to troubles which might hit earth and human life in the near future - which is the thing that made it special for me despite the basic story not being a complete novelty in the area of dystopian scifi literature. But it is well-told and therefore fun to read anyway. I'm still not sure whether I was meant to symapthise most with the androids, or if that's just me.

Bis auf die Tatsache, dass die Handlungen des Protagonisten nicht wirklich nachvollziehbar sind, war die erste Hälfte ganz gut. Dann aber wird es langsam wirklich nervig. Nicht nur, weil der Prota seine Verliebtheit wechselt, wie Socken. Und das Ende ist eigentlich erst der (offene!) Beginn der Geschichte.