Allegro Pastel

Leif Rand depicts with stunning emotional clarity the trials millennials must go through to come to know themselves in the digital age. Allegro Pastel paints an intimate portrait of Berlin at the peak of its mythos: a place of freedom and nonconformism flickering on the threshold of becoming something else - more normalised, more serene, less exciting perhaps. – Vincenzo LatronicoAllegro Pastel captures the recent past and straddles a line between critique and description in a breathtaking way. Subtle and devastating. Leif Randt is a wonderful writer – Chris KrausThreesomes, sex parties and pharmaceuticals will neither ruin these characters nor save them. They’re simply a part of the scenery. – Naoise Dolan * Berlin Review *One of the most important books in contemporary German literature … No millennial will be able to write a novel in the future without referring to Allegro Pastel * Die Zeit *Randt is adroit at creating a sense of immediacy and presence - of nowness. – Elvia Wilk * Bookforum *Allegro Pastel captures deftly the disorientating tensions between the digital and physical worlds so characteristic of contemporary life. – Harry Strawson * TLS *No millennial should miss this book: Leif Randt’s novel Allegro Pastel is the perfect penetration of the present * Die Zeit *One of the most stylistically confident authors of his generation. His stories are distant and controlled, and yet sentence follows sentence organically, as if each one has grown there naturally. His language resembles the movements at a techno party. Randt listens into the present and lets his words dance to this sound * Neues Deutschland *Generation Z may one day save the world, but they will never produce literature as strangely exciting as Allegro Pastel * SZ *Allegro Pastel is more than just another successful book. It is directly contemporary and at the same time an absolutely coherent document of an aesthetic moment of time * Suddeutsche Zeitung *

Leif Randt is a freelance writer living in Maintal and Berlin. His novels include Planet Magnon and Shimmering Haze over CobyCounty. Allegro Pastel, his fourth work, was a bestseller in Germany and nominated for the German Book Prize. A movie adaptation will appear in cinemas in fall 2025. He has co-curated the online platform Tegel Media since 2017.

Peter Kuras is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has written about politics and culture for the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and Der Freitag.