Gentle giant Florian Herscht is an orphan, adopted by a neo-Nazi who has apprenticed him as a graffiti cleaner. The Boss, a Bach fanatic, is enraged that someone is spraying wolf emblems across the monuments to the famed composer in their east German town. He is determined to punish the culprit and Florian has no choice but to join his gang as they devise a plan to catch him.

But Florian has bigger things to worry about: having attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he can see that the world might end at any moment. Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai's novel is a tour de force, a moving character study, a blistering satire and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas we face today. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet