In Jenny Erpenbeck's powerful novel, Richard, a recently retired professor in Berlin, finds his quiet life disrupted by a group of African asylum seekers. Intrigued by their protest, he begins to visit their shelter and listen to their stories of harrowing journeys and uncertain futures. As Richard delves deeper, his own sense of history, identity, and what it means to have a home is profoundly challenged. This moving narrative masterfully connects Germany's own past with the urgent contemporary crisis of displacement, asking what it truly means to be a neighbor in a globalized world.