All the Lights

by Clemens Meyer, Katy Derbyshire (Translator), Stuart Evers (Introduction)

Overview

Winner of the 2008 Leipzig Book Fair Prize

A man bets all he has on a horse race to pay for an expensive operation for his dog. A young refugee wants to box her way straight off the boat to the top of the sport. Old friends talk all night after meeting up by chance. She imagines a future together.

Stories about people who have lost out in life and in love, and about their hopes for one really big win, the chance to make something of their lives. In silent apartments, desolate warehouses, prisons and by the river, Meyer strikes the tone of our harsh times, and finds the grace notes, the bright lights shining in the dark.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781916751309
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Clemens Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle and now lives in Leipzig, both cities in what was East Germany. All the Lights won the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2008, and was first published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2011. He has been twice longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Editorial Reviews

Take the bare prose of Raymond Carver, apply the bleak outlook of Michel Houellebecq, place characters from an Irvine Welsh book on German streets, and you have something close to this collection of 15 short stories… His tales have an evanescent, impressionistic quality… Meyer thrills and rewards.” —Alex Rayner, The Guardian
“Stories of brilliance.” —Chris Power, The Guardian
“What Meyer manages to achieve leaves you speechless. These stories glow in the world’s darkness.” —Die Welt
“Clemens Meyer writes the best crafted, toughest and most heart-rending stories in Germany.” —Spiegel
“Meyer tells us about people who normally are not ‘literary subject matter’ […] Respect to him. He’s the real deal. We need storytellers like him.” —Die Zeit

From the Publisher

2025-05-16
German author Meyer’s stories trace a handful of troubled lives.

This collection abounds with bad decisions, traumatic events, and ominous conclusions. In an introduction, British writer Stuart Evers observes that “the lives Meyer depicts are small ones; ones lived in the margins of society.” The story “I’m Still Here!” follows a boxer—“a Black Dutchman from Rotterdam with a mashed-up face”—as he endures existential doubt and racist abuse. It’s a vision of the sport stripped of all glamour: “He was what they called a ‘journeyman’—they brought him in so that he’d lose.” The protagonist of “Carriage 29,” meanwhile, wakes up on board a train with little sense of what he’s doing there. Some of his own actions leave him baffled; at one point he wonders, “Why would a veteran wine rep like me ever drink this plonk?” Humans aren’t the only creatures in trouble in these stories; two of the most memorable—“Of Dogs and Horses” and “The Old Man Buries His Beasts”—focus on the fraught relationship between humans and their pets. The former is particularly unnerving, as it begins with the protagonist being reminded of his dog’s mortality only for Meyer to reveal more about the depth of the bond between man and beast, laying the groundwork for a truly haunting final image. Meyer isn’t working in a wholly realistic mode throughout; there’s also the grim delirium of “The Short Happy Life of Johannes Vettermann,” which opens with a vision of a man with the head of a dog. And a reference early in the book to “one of those disturbing street lamps, one of those lamps that never stop annoying you” hints at an absurdist edge.

Bleak stories of uneasy personalities, told with one foot in the surreal.

Kirkus Reviews