Krank:

Love in the New Dark Times

This is a work of Political Fiction. This is also a story of Time Travel.

It's November 11th, 2009. Ainsley Giddings steps aboard a Toronto ferry to Ward's Island. A forties-something psychotherapist on a self-imposed writing retreat, she has sublet a cottage for a year.

Unbeknownst to her, Berlin playwright Bertolt Brecht, astonished at being restored to life, is on that same ferry boat. Having died in 1956, his heyday was in Berlin in the 1930s. An anti-fascist playwright, his musicals made him a 'person of significance' to the Nazis. Suddenly, he has been brought back — given a second chance at life.

Ainsley and he strike up a conversation on the ferry. What develops is a bizarre and eccentric love affair. Mixed into their affair are island airport politics and eventually a civic uprising in downtown Toronto — essentially the G-20 — which provokes a brutal repression by the police. This of course reminds Brecht of the 1930s resistance against Fascism in Berlin, especially when he is caught in the sweep by cops and thrown into a temporary jail with hundreds of others.

Ainsley's exertions at translating modern life to Brecht while trying to remain resolutely apolitical lead to their escape to Berlin where time takes another astonishing and bizarre half-twist around these two mismatched lovers.