Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction "A funny and moving debut."-Charles
Arrowsmith The Washington Post “A love letter to Berlin to travel and to saying yes to
life.”-Alan Cumming It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam
Singer a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York
Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an
identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets the
candlelit cafÉs and techno clubs the astonishing mash-up of architecture monuments and
memorials. A trip that begins in isolation evolves into one of deep connection and
possibility. In an intensely concentrated series of days Sam finds himself awash in the city
stretched in limbo between his own past and future-in nightclubs with Jeremy a lonely wannabe
DJ navigating a flirtation with Kaspar an East Berlin artist he meets at a cafÉ and engaged
in a budding relationship with Magda the enigmatic and icy manager of Sam’s hotel whom Sam
finds himself drawn to and determined to thaw. I Make Envy on Your Disco is at once a tribute
to Berlin a novel of longing and connection and a coming-of-middle-age story about
confronting the person you were and becoming the person you want to be.
