Talking Location With Daniel S Chertoff – PARIS
Stories of the City – BERLIN
19th August 2026
Berlin Babel ed. Katy Derbyshire, stories of the City – BERLIN
“A city like this is prime literary material” states editor Katy Derbyshire in the introduction. She goes on to say that besides excellent writing, she had focussed on finding stories that had a strong sense of place, looking beyond the clichés to find some sort of essence of being in the city post-COVID.
This selected anthology of 14 stories offers a good glimpse into life from many different perspectives. Some will be familiar, others will enable the reader to delve into the city through the eyes of its inhabitants.
“.. a city always riddled with on-going building projects..” (Ice in Their Laughter by Feng Yurui, TR: WU Xiujie)
There are stories that incorporate history and throw light on previous residents, there are bones and graveyards to remind contemporary citizens of lives lived – often under unbearable circumstances. This collection reflects the city doing its thing in unusual and unique ways, a cross-section of people portrayed with insight and acuity.
As a tourist travelling around the city, it is evident that Berliners are besotted with their allotments, huge swathes of the city are dedicated to a bit of personal space and greenery and this passion is beautifully evoked in Allotment Years by David Wagner (TR: Imogen Taylor)
I particularly liked Jane Yager’s The Scaffolding, which highlights the insecurity of the housing market. Ownership changes of one large building containing several flats and the new owner’s identity is well concealed within a convoluted company, therefore there is no redress for problems that arise for those living there. Regulated rental payments are circumvented and the threat of eviction hangs heavy over the tenants. It is, of course, unsettling when the flaws in the building are identified and the scaffolding erected, which then remains in situ for an absurd length of time.
In A Rage to Live by Leon Craig, the main character trawls through her friend’s bookshelves and picks up “a 
slender translated volume that detailed the travails of a friendly East German podiatrist, whose experience of life int eh city was utterly unrecognisable compared to the steady diet of expat novels about riotous excess, underemployment, and bohemianism, with which I had nourished my desire to move here“. That is such a keen observation, because I have read SO many books that drill down into the drug culture and offbeat nature of Berlin and I have – depressingly – truly had my fill of those novels. The novel highlighted in this instance, I believe, is Katja Ostkamp’s Marzahn, Mon Amour, (TR: Jo Heinrich), which is one of the best recent books to conjure up Berlin and proves to be such a great story (it is a novel that deserves a wide readership). Another novel in the same league is Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, TR: Sophie Hughes (shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025).
These are multifaceted stories told through the lens of people who have landed in the city from around the world. They are a far cry from the many louche club experiences and excesses that have defined the city in recent literature (remember Good Girl by Aria Aber, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2025?).
Berlin is a world city, very unrepresentative of Germany as a whole, and these stories really capture the quotidian lives in wonderful and very readable detail. A definite choice for anyone who is drawn to the city.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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