Adam and Evelyn

In this wonderfully humorous and deceptively simple love story, Ingo Schulze upends our expectations from the get-go.

It is 1989 in East Germany. Adam is a tailor and dressmaker living in his own Garden of Eden in East Germany, where he leads a life of dressing—and undressing—his appreciative clientele. Evelyn is a restless young waitress who, having just unexpectedly quit her job, returns home to find Adam with one of his customers.

The snake having reared its ugly head, Evelyn packs her belongings and runs off to Hungary with friends. When Adam banishes himself from the safe confines of his home, his garden, and his livelihood in pursuit of Evelyn, this Fall of Man coincides with the beginnings of a much more contemporary Fall—a wobbling Hungary opening its borders to Austria, the wall in Berlin beginning to crack, and Adam and Evelyn swept out into the Western world on a human tide of eager refugees desperate to find new freedoms. Paradise Regained? Perhaps not . . .