3 days ago
Sheena Kalayil’s The Others Reframes German Reunification Through Outsiders
The Others is a novel about three young people living around the time the Berlin Wall fell.
Armando is a worker from Mozambique, Lolita is a medical student from India, and Theo lives in East Berlin.
Their lives become connected through friendship and romance.
Big political changes are happening around them.
The story shows that reunification affected foreign workers and students as well as German citizens.
Sheena Kalayil wanted these characters to feel like complete people, not just symbols of migration.
She used a love story to explore their feelings and choices.
The novel also questions what home means when people are forced to move.
It was recognized by being placed on the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist.
Sheena Kalayil’s novel The Others explores the overlooked experiences of foreign workers and students after German reunification.
Set before and after the Berlin Wall’s fall, the story follows Armando, Lolita and Theo.
The characters’ lives intersect in a love triangle amid political upheaval, surveillance and displacement.
Kalayil drew on her experience as an international student and her knowledge of Mozambique, but chose not to write directly from a Mozambican worker’s perspective.
The novel was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction after several publishers rejected it.
- Who
- Novelist Sheena Kalayil and the three fictional protagonists Armando, Lolita and Theo.
- What
- Kalayil’s novel The Others examines love, migration and displacement around the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- Where
- The novel moves between East Germany and the experiences of characters connected to Mozambique and India.
- When
- The story is set in the months before and after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; the novel was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
- Why
- Kalayil wanted to highlight foreign workers and students often left out of celebratory accounts of German reunification and give migrant characters greater interiority.
Key facts
- Novel
- The Others
- Author
- Sheena Kalayil
- Setting
- The months before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall
- Main characters
- Armando, a Mozambican factory worker; Lolita, an Indian medical student; and Theo, an East Berliner
- Historical backdrop
- The collapse of the German Democratic Republic and German reunification
- Recognition
- Longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction
- Publishing context
- The novel was rejected by many publishers before being accepted by an independent press
Quotes
Sheena Kalayil
Manchester-based novelist and author of The Others
“I wanted those kinds of personal dramas, those dilemmas that you have when you are a young adult to be the focus while the moment of political change is going on.”
indianexpress.com
“A lot of stories of migration don’t allow that interiority. That level of introspection is granted to authors who are not trying to write stories about migration.”
indianexpress.com
Sources
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