Inka Parei Die Schattenboxerin (The Shadow Boxer) Schöffling, 1999, 183pp. ISBN 3 89561 105 0 In time this novel straddles the fall of the Berlin Wall, one strand of it starting in the spring of 1989, the other about three years later. But politics is not its theme. Rather it evokes, in a remarkably intense way, a Berlin of decaying apartment blocks, tumble-down industrial districts and scruffy parks, far away from the bright lights. The central character, Hell, is an orphan brought up in West Berlin. Going through the city while a demonstration is taking place she flees with the rest of the crowd from the police and ends up in a piece of disused railway ground, where she is chased by a large dog and molested by the dog's owner, a Frenchman. Next day at a police station she meets a Chinese woman whose husband teaches kung-fu. She trains until she is an expert in self-defence - one aspect of the shadow-boxing referred to in the title. In the second strand of the narrative, interwoven with the first, we find Hell squatting in a decrepit nineteenth-century apartment block in the old eastern part of the city. The only other occupant is a young woman called Dunkel. (There is significance in these names, meaning 'light' and 'dark' in German.) Dunkel disappears and a man called März, who carries a rucksack full of bank-notes and a gun, comes looking for her. Hell joins him in his search, during which they become involved in a series of bizarre coincidences. Hell's kung-fu comes in handy as the police catch up with them, and she fights off another dog. In so doing she seems to exorcise her past hurts. She is able to give up 'shadow-boxing' and to embark, with Dunkel, on real life. The great virtues of this novel are its immediacy and physicality, and the way in which the style reflects the psychology of the narrator as she shifts from withdrawal to at least a tentative self-confidence. Inka Parei has been hailed in Germany as an author of real promise.