Allegro Pastel

(Paperback)

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Description

Tanja and Jerome are navigating a long-distance relationship in a world of constant communication and emotional hyper-reflection. Whether they're texting one another trip updates from midday raves or debating the best trainers in the own-brand aisle of Decathlon, every gesture is controlled and self-aware. This is love in the therapeutic age.

Written with crackling insight, dry humour, and deep emotional intelligence, Allegro Pastel proclaims Leif Randt as the premiere German stylist of his generation.

Reviews

Allegro Pastel captures the recent past and straddles a line between critique and description in a breathtaking way. Subtle and devastating. Leif Randt is a wonderful writer -- Chris Kraus
Threesomes, sex parties and pharmaceuticals will neither ruin these characters nor save them. They're simply a part of the scenery. -- Naoise Dolan * Berlin Review *
Leif Rand depicts with stunning emotional clarity the trials millennials must go through to come to know themselves in the digital age. Allegro Pastel paints an intimate portrait of Berlin at the peak of its mythos: a place of freedom and nonconformism flickering on the threshold of becoming something else - more normalised, more serene, less exciting perhaps. -- Vincenzo Latronico
One of the most important books in contemporary German literature . . . No millennial will be able to write a novel in the future without referring to Allegro Pastel * Die Zeit *
No millennial should miss this book: Leif Randt's novel Allegro Pastel is the perfect penetration of the present * Die Zeit *
One of the most stylistically confident authors of his generation. His stories are distant and controlled, and yet sentence follows sentence organically, as if each one has grown there naturally. His language resembles the movements at a techno party. Randt listens into the present and lets his words dance to this sound * Neues Deutschland *
Generation Z may one day save the world, but they will never produce literature as strangely exciting as Allegro Pastel * SZ *
Allegro Pastel is more than just another successful book. It is directly contemporary and at the same time an absolutely coherent document of an aesthetic moment of time * Suddeutsche Zeitung *

Author Bio

Leif Randt is a freelance writer living in Maintal and Berlin. His novels include Planet Magnon and Shimmering Haze over CobyCounty. Allegro Pastel, his fourth work, was a bestseller in Germany and nominated for the German Book Prize. A movie adaptation will appear in cinemas in fall 2025. He has co-curated the online platform Tegel Media since 2017.

Peter Kuras is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has written about politics and culture for the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and Der Freitag.