Shift Sleepers

Book excerpt: A novel by a Swiss writer that features figures from all over Europe from different walks of life coming together in secret to talk through their experiences, hopes, and dreams. Somewhere deep in the European forest, they meet. Frontier workers, smugglers, refugees, workers, asylum seekers, inspectors, artists, musicians, actors, journalists, scholarship holders, logisticians, students, and ghosts. They come from everywhere. They are all representatives of our time, and they have conversations about origins and justice; body and state; import and export; homeland and migration. They talk together about happiness, music, and death. In Shift Sleepers, Swiss writer Dorothee Elmiger has produced a novel that sheds light on the controversial issues of our time, finding a new language for this conversation previously unheard in contemporary German literature.