Jed-young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago-flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin.

Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America. But history, both personal and political, can’t be avoided with time or distance. Whether it’s the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband’s bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy Jed desperately longs for, the past never stays past, even in faraway Berlin.

An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider searching for an obscure home in Europe’s brightest and darkest city.

. Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by The Millions, Flavorwire, The Boston Globe, and The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel . For readers of Teju Cole