Sister Europe
By Nell Zink
On 7 March 2025, the New York Times published a list of words the Trump administration was systematically culling from government documents and educational materials. This list, which includes the words “gender ideology”, “affirming care”, “ethnicity”, “identity”, “racism”, “political”, “intersectional” and “privilege”, reads like a bingo card for Nell Zink’s astonishingly prescient Sister Europe, in which a large cast of racially, economically and gender-diverse characters convene over the course of a single evening to attend a literary awards ceremony in Berlin.
On its surface, Sister Europe is a comedy of manners set among Berlin’s exclusive and elusive cultural elite. The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny. Entertaining banter could be this book’s largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which…
