Shift Sleepers

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.

Dorothee Elmiger is a Berlin-based Swiss writer. Her debut novel Invitation to the Bold of Heart received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Kelag Prize in 2010, and in 2015 she was awarded a Swiss Literature Award by the Federal Office of Culture and the Erich-Fried-Preis. Megan Ewing is a lecturer of German at the University of Michigan.