Empty Hearts

Chapter 1

Knut and Janina come over at five.

The weather s splendid. For several days now, the sun has shown the kind of strength you would hardly have thought it capable of after a typical Braunschweig winter and the drizzly first weeks of spring. The light lies like pale yellow chiffon on the smooth surfaces of the furniture, sparkles in the glasses on the table, penetrates into the remotest dust-­free corners. Three times a week, Britta has Henry, a young man from Laos, make the house spick-­and-­span. Unfortunately, the picture windows always exhibit a couple of smudges that Henry has missed.

With the children, daily routines have changed somewhat. Before, the adults would have met at dusk for the first aperitifs, not in broad daylight for dinner. But that s normal, it s the same for all of them, the whole army of parents with only children. Britta used to work until midnight, sleep until noon, and ingest the first solid food of the day in the early afternoon, when Babak, no morning person himself, would come to the office with something ­usually a sandwich ­for her to eat. The arrival of baby Vera seven years ago put an end to all that. Only sometimes Britta still feels a slight dizziness and something akin to alarm, symptoms of existential jet lag.

This mess keeps falling apart, Richard calls from the kitchen, addressing no one in particular. Out in the hallway, Britta accepts the bottle of red wine that Knut has brought, a nice gesture, even though they have a whole cellar full of Luis Felipe Edwards Cabernet Sauvignon, a 2020 Chilean she and Richard like and have grown used to. She ll regift Knut s Rioja, a bottle with a ribbon around its neck, when the opportunity arises.

Sticky fingers. Richard laughs as he raises his gummy hands in the air and greets his guests with his elbows. I m following the recipe exactly, but the stuff still looks like biowaste.

Before him lie shreds of seaweed and clumps of gooey rice, the results of his

JULI ZEH's novels include Eagles and Angels, In Free Fall, and Decompression. She has worked at the United Nations in New York, taught at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig, and currently lives in Brandenburg, where she is an honorary constitutional judge. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her work, including the German Book Prize, the Carl Amery Literature Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, and the Hildegard von Bingen Award, and several of her novels have been adapted for film and television. In 2018, she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her outstanding contribution to literature.

If you want to write a dystopian novel in these quasi-dystopian times, you need to go dark. Really dark. And the premise of Juli Zeh s bracing, furious novel, Empty Hearts, is so dark that I laughed out loud when I read it on the book s back cover . . . Empty Hearts has the veneer of a thriller but it s more accurate to call it a chiller: chilling in the accuracy of its satire and chilling in its diagnosis of our modern malaise.
Adam Sternbergh, New York Times Book Review

Empty Hearts explores interesting ideas about the price of failure to act against tyranny . . . Zeh challenges readers to consider how complicit we are in our current political dilemmas.
Paula L. Woods, Los Angeles Times

2019 has seen a string of novelists exploring the destabilised Western political psyche, but Empty Hearts strikes me as one of the strongest so far. It asks, what if the current political climate led not to catastrophe, but to stagnation? Its answer comes in the form of both a riveting thriller and a nuanced piece of social science fiction predictive and precautionary . . . Brilliantly executed one of the stand-outs of the year.
Helen Marshall, New Scientist

"As dark and funny as the genre gets."
Boris Kachka, Vulture.com (7 New Books You Should Read this August)

Darkly entertaining . . . A thoughtful political thriller with a provocative sense of humor.
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A gripping, character-driven thriller that s rooted in insightful political commentary-perfect for beach reading.
Booklist

Will keep readers turning the pages . . . Zeh makes it easy to suspend disbelief in this cold-blooded and macabre future.
Publishers Weekly