On 7 March 2025 the New York Timespublisheda list of wordsthat the Trump administration was systematically culling from government documents and educational materials. This list, which includes the words “gender ideology”, “affirming care”, “confirmation bias”, “ethnicity”, “identity”, “immigrants”, “racism”, “prostitute”, “political”, “intersectional” and “privilege”, reads like a bingo card for Nell Zink’s astonishingly prescient new novel, Sister Europe, in which a large cast of racially, economically and gender-diverse characters convene over the course of a single evening to attend a literary awards ceremony in Berlin.
On its surface, Sister Europe is a comedy of manners set among Berlin’s exclusive and elusive cultural elite. The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny: Zink’s dialogue reads like our best plays. Entertaining banter could be this book’s largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which are so ambitious and ethically interested that they make it clear that Zink is one of our most important contemporary writers.
Like the film classicMy Dinner with Andre, in Sister Europe the interactions between characters are vehicles through which philosophical quandaries are explored. However, while the questions in My Dinner with Andre are largely posed in the abstract, here they are shockingly specific. For example, Demian, a German art critic, struggles to reconcile his admiration for the Arabic writer being honoured, Masud, with racist elements in Masud’s writing:
In this way, Zink repeatedly names systems of power without being moralistic. She is simultaneously stringent and funny, which is disarming. Humour is one of our best tools for processing extreme violence: Zink knows this, and accordingly deploys her singular wit throughout.
Over the course of the evening, Zink’s characters vocalise their desires, fears and prejudices. Nothing, including narrating from the consciousness of an economically privileged 15-year-old trans girl who tries her hand at streetwalking, is off limits. The most working-class character in the book is an Israel-loving antisemitic German cop who takes bribes from pimps but also delivers an exacting critique of the decriminalisation of prostitution under the Social Democratic-Green German government in 2002.
In this way, Zink endows each of her characters with both moral high grounds and glaring blind spots. In Sister Europe,as in life, who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor is not fixed. The ever-shifting flow of social and sexual power between the characters is nerve-racking and tantalising: there are no saints and no demons.
Though her work is rarely discussed in the context of politics, Zink is one of our most ambitious and explicitly political writers. Here she shows us that the Trump administration’s embargoed words are not weapons, but questions. Nothing is more dangerous to a dictator than someone who can anticipate, and therefore interrogate, their actions. Sister Europeperforms an intellectually rigorous interrogation of the ideas the Trump administration deems most dangerous, all the while dressed in the outfit of an extravagant Hermes-clad literary gala.
While this is a novel of ideas, the narrative is never cold or cerebral. It’s beautifully felt, and emotionally open-handed. I wanted love and joy for each of the 13 main characters, which the book (surprisingly!) delivers. As the long night is coming to an end, and morning is threatening to creep over the winter streets of Berlin, Zink’s large cast pairs off and an unlikely couple trade pillow talk:
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This book is not a rejection of identity politics, but a plea for the possibility of an evolving self; a bid against inner stagnancy. LikeErasure by Percival Everett, Sister Europe addresses the claustrophobia that can accompany an identity. No character, real or imagined, enjoys being flattened.
Rita Bullwinkel’s novel Headshot is published by Daunt. Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.