15/03/2026
What can a novel show?
When we think about democratic transitions, we often turn to history books, timelines, and political analysis. Kairos approaches the same moment differently.
Through a single relationship — its intensity, imbalance, tenderness, and cruelty — the novel explores how systemic change enters private life.
It’s also a novel shaped by hindsight. The reader knows that the world around the characters is changing. That the political system sustaining their lives will soon collapse. But the characters themselves do not experience history that way. They move through time without certainty.
Fiction cannot replace history. But it can show something history often struggles to capture: how political transformation feels while it is happening.
Not as a clear turning point, but as something lived through in real time. Messy and blurred at the edges. Our personal macro histories evolving in tandem with the bigger picture that we can’t see. Looking back, we search for decisive moments. Living through them, we rarely recognise them.
Thank you for reading Kairos with us. Next up: Adventures in Democracy by Erica Benner.
Video extract from Haunted Territory: Jenny Erpenbeck in Conversation With Louise Steinman, published on YouTube by
📖
