Two old men roam through Berlin, stopping to eat hamburgers at McDonald's, observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the wall in 1989: Theo Wuttke, former East German cultural functionary; and Ludwig Hoftaller - Wuttke's shadow - a mid-level spy who can serve the Gestapo or the Stasi with equal dedication.

Grass writes with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition and political acerbity for which he is celebrated. This novel will stand as perhaps the most complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's reunification will eventually come to mean.

'Grass's novel is a perfect instrument for tracing echoes and parallels across German writing and history. No other German novelist could have pulled off such a feat' The Economist

The appeal of the novel is the acute sense it gives of the heady mixture of transitions and elaborations which lent the years 1989-1991 their distinctive feeling. Grass has succeeded in setting down monuments to those dog days of division, with their linguistic shifts and iconography, rapidly changing cast of characters, uncertainty, and exhilaration.' Times Literary Supplement