With unbounded erudition and an admirable ethical and political vision, Gero Bauer boldly rethinks the relationship between hope and kinship in our increasingly precarious contemporary world. Displaying all the hallmarks of literary studies at its best, Bauer's book offers his readers not only an incisive exploration of recent works of fiction but also a fresh perspective on some of the most urgent theoretical debates in the humanities.

Corey McEleney, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University, USA

Gero Bauer's study is an urgent and impassioned book for and about the present. In a time of seemingly perpetual crisis, how do we maintain our faith in the future? Ranging widely across contemporary culture, and engaging always with the reality of our anxious times, Bauer finds bold imaginings of hope, solidarity, care and belonging – the very things that can make a future possible, now.

Mark Turner, Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, King's College London, UK