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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, we're turning to the East today, trekking through Revolutionary Russia

and into the distant future, as Margaret Atwood helps me explore

Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian classic, We.

But before that, communism of a more recent vintage,

life in the German Democratic Republic is one of the subjects that informs the work of

Jenny Erpenbeck, whose haunting novels explore and challenge perceptions of German history and society.

They include visitation, a literary mosaic centeredred on a lakehouse in Brandenburg,

and the end of days, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize,

which begins with an infant's death before charting a century-spanning sequence of her possible lives.

Erpenbeck's most recent novel, Go-Went Gone,

sees her focus on the present moment and the plight of refugees in Berlin.

All of these ideas and themes are present in her latest book, the essay collection, not a novel.

It might not be a novel, but the opening few pieces describing her childhood in East Berlin

certainly have the feel of her fiction, hypnotically rhythmical and filled with

a resting imagery. I'm delighted to say Jenny Erpenbeck joins me now on the line from Berlin. Jenny,

...