That his new novel would be now, as it appears, have such a sensitivity, not has seen John Lanchester in advance and not planned. “At least not intentionally,” he says: “It all started with a dream. I worked two years ago, another novel, had a certain image in your head, always returned, and slept. I dreamed of a man standing on a wall, alone, at night, on the coast, the views of the sea. I started thinking about who that might be and in what kind of world he lives. For me, it was the image of a world after a climate disaster, so I had the image, a character, a world and began to write a new book: The wall’.“

Julia Encke

editor in the Feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

F. A. Z.

An “elongated monster of concrete” is this the protection wall that surrounds in Roman Britain, to repel intruders. He is ten thousand kilometers in length (“this country has a lot of coast”), the side that goes to the sea, is five meters high and on the land side, depending on the nature of the terrain of different height. Every three kilometers there is a guard house, a total of more than three thousand. There are walls, stairs, barracks, exit locks for boats, helipads. Everything is made of concrete, and the United Kingdom impenetrable closed. At least that is the goal.

John Lanchester, who came in 1962 in Hamburg to the world – the mother of Ireland, the father a South African-born Banker, who grew up in Asia, as a Journalist, stunning analyses for the “London Review of Books” and the “New Yorker” writes, and his novel “capital” is about the life in the big city in the times of the financial crisis six years ago also in Germany, became famous, designs with the Vision of a near future. She plays in a time after the “change” as the climate catastrophe that has already taken place here, is called in the novel is vague. It was not him gone so much to describe about the way of the future, of what is going on, says Lanchester, but to do this the direction in which we are going to show the way we are.