'We got used to the silence around us and to the stories we didn’t understand.' 

Stine was just four years old when the country she was born into ceased to exist. Too young to remember life before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she grew up in a household haunted by loss and fracture. Her family struggled to find its place in a newly unified Germany, and questions about the past were met with silence – a silence that transformed their home into a place of fear. 

Told in fragments that blend fiction, poetry and a searing investigation of the past, The Possibility of Happiness finds Stine, now an author, reckoning with her family’s – and her country’s – complex history. 

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'A tense, compelling story that examines the wounds of a generation caught between dictatorship and democracy.'