I'm thrilled to have a new short story called 'Mitropa' in this excellent anthology of commentary on the Second World in contemporary British writing from Bonn University Press. It's written in my favourite second person - lots of seconds going on here - and is narrated by a minor Character from The Leizpig Affair.
It was such a pleasure to revisit those characters and settings - especially the fabulous Mitropa at Leipzig train station as it was in the 1980s - and to imagine them in the present day. You can find out more about the Leipzig Mitropa in Alltag Ost (in German).
The anthology sprung from a conference on the 'Second World' in contemporary British writing at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, which was chaired by Katrin Berndt, professor of English literature and culture at the university. It includes a paper by Katrin in which she explores "retrotopian projections" in The Leipzig Affair and in Philip Sington's The Valley of Unknowing.
There's also an excellent paper by Richard Brown on fiction and the political in Ian McEwan's Second World writing, plus an interview with Katja Hoyer, author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.
