Destiny, or The Attraction of Affinities
John David Morley
 Following in his father Magnus's footsteps, Jason Gould travels to Germany in 1961 but, unlike Magnus, Jason never returns to England, remaining to witness the construction of the Berlin Wall and the division of the country, meanwhile falling in love with the daughter of a woman whom his own father had once hoped to marry. Conceived alongside the unification of Germany in 1990, the novel confronts haunting questions about the collective guilt of the Holocaust, the oppressive ideological constraints of life in the GDR and the radical terrorism of the Red Army Faction. The narrative explicitly evokes Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Caspar David Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, while tracing the evolution of a cultural identity inescapably overshadowed by a political history of perennial trauma.