The discussion will be held in English.

In his novel, American author Phillip B. Williams, winner of the American Book Award, examines the question of what freedom truly means, and, writing in the tradition of magic realism, he explores what it means to be Black in the United States. The story is set in the early 19th century in Ours, the town established and protected by the powerful matriarch Saint, and which remains hidden from the world. The town offers a refuge to all those she has freed from enslavement. But as Saint’s own wounds begin to cast increasingly darker shadows and a new force infiltrates the town, the residents begin to question the nature of safety — and whether it is inevitably rooted in a kind of unfreedom. “A triumph of imagination over grim reality, of magic over rationality, of poetry over the prose of circumstance.” — DIE ZEIT