Leif Randt is a freelance writer living in Maintal and Berlin. His novels include Leuchtspielhaus and Planet Magnon. Allegro Pastel, his fourth work, was nominated for the German Book Prize. A movie adaptation will appear in cinemas in spring 2025. He has co-curated the online platform Tegel Media since 2017.

Peter Kuras is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has written about politics and culture for the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and Der Freitag.

Allegro Pastel is more than just another successful book. It is directly contemporary and at the same time an absolutely coherent document of an aesthetic moment of time-- "Suddeutsche Zeitung"

One of the most important books in contemporary German literature . . . No millennial will be able to write a novel in the future without referring to Allegro Pastel-- "Die Zeit"

One of the most stylistically confident authors of his generation. His stories are distant and controlled, and yet sentence follows sentence organically, as if each one has grown there naturally. His language resembles the movements at a techno party. Randt listens into the present and lets his words dance to this sound-- "Neues Deutschland"

Generation Z may one day save the world, but they will never produce literature as strangely exciting as Allegro Pastel-- "SZ"

No millennial should miss this book: Leif Randt's novel Allegro Pastel is the perfect penetration of the present-- "Die Zeit"

Publisher: Granta Magazine Editions

Pub date: 2025-06-03

Length: 288 pages