Allegro Pastel - by Leif Randt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new title in the Granta Magazine Editions series: a vivid, ironic and blisteringly contemporary account of millennial love in Frankfurt and Berlin.

Allegro Pastel follows a cult author and a web designer as they live and love in contemporary Berlin.

Tanja and Jerome are navigating a long-distance relationship in a world of constant communication and emotional hyper-reflection. Whether they're WhatsApping one another from drug-fueled dance parties or sending ambiguous emojis on a trip to Decathlon, every gesture is controlled and self-aware. This is love in the post-therapeutic age, set against the backdrop of a rapidly heating climate.

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

Review Quotes

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 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"

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"

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"

Generation Z may one day save the world, but they will never produce literature as strangely exciting as Allegro Pastel-- "SZ"

About the Author

Leif Randt is a freelance writer living in Maintal and Berlin. His novels include Leuchtspielhaus and Planet Magnon. Allegro Pastel, his fourth work, was nominated for the German Book Prize. A movie adaptation will appear in cinemas in spring 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.