The Experts

The 1960s have started and with them the Age of Aquarius. Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death in Tel Aviv. Konrad Adenauer agrees on military aid for Israel. At the same time, however, German aeronautical engineers, engine builders and rocket scientists are drawn to Egypt in great numbers.

Rita Hellberg, daughter of an engineer, just wants to visit her parents in Cairo. But her father decides that the family belongs together. Egypt’s president Nasser dreams of an African arms industry and so the father builds a fighter bomber. While her mother refuses to accept life in Cairo, Rita soon realises that there is no better place for her to enter her own future. She lets herself be carried off into a fascinating world on the move. Only gradually she realises that she has arrived at the centre of a conflict in which people fight tooth and nail about historical and future, about global and regional political interests. Everybody is watching everybody, bombs explode, people die. Rita Hellberg has to decide whose side she is on.

»You can now turn down the volume on the popular record with the constant lament about how German authors have nothing to offer compared to the Anglo-American market. Merle Kröger has long since provided evidence to the contrary.« Hannes Hintermeier, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»A book that speaks in tongues, in which different archival landscapes begin to speak most delicately with one voice. [A book] that is a story about friendship, a coming-of-age story, contemporary history, a poetological experiment and a suspenseful novel. The next level for historical thrillers. Everything that comes after is going to have to measure up to this.« Elmar Krekeler, DIE WELT

»With its unerring aesthetics The Experts is diametrically opposed to the ›We have suffered too‹-mindset that is once more spreading in Germany.« Tobias Gohlis, DIE ZEIT

»A milestone [in the field of] historical thrillers.« Welt am Sonntag

»A milestone in German literature. […] An explosive topic is being dealt with on the highest literary level.« DIWAN

»Colossal!« Tobias Gohlis, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»[…] a broad, intelligently stages, lively and highly suspenseful panorama with thriller elements that are derived not exclusively but partly from the real-life story. She has created a dense parcel of many small, documentary and fictionalised elements and entanglements, from international politics to everyday life in Cairo.« Frank Rumpel, SWR

»A great, a spectacular, an important novel. For me, I can already say this now, one of the [best] novels of the year.« Ulrich Noller, WDR

»The way she interweaves her elaborate research on politics and science with an authentic coming-of-age story (while always maintaining a slighly mocking tone) alone is absolutely brilliant. [...] Merle Kröger is one of the country's best writers!« Lutz Göllner, tip Berlin