the book. The mother has frequently changing partners (including Don's father in some cases), who are usually aggressive and also beat and harass Don. Hannah is the only child of Asian parents. Her mother dies after a medical error, leading her father to commit suicide. Karen is highly gifted and therefore suffers especially from the viciousness of her two brothers. Her black, single mother is completely overwhelmed by the situation. All family members (except Karen) die in a house fire. Peter is autistic and comes to England from Poland with his mother. His mother leaves him alone in Rochdale and moves to London with a rich Russian. Furthermore, there are numerous secondary characters in the book, some of whom appear once, others regularly. Among other things, EX 2279 regularly expresses itself in the programming language Brainfuck. Reception Commercial success Immediately after its publication, the novel made it onto Der Spiegel bestseller list, where it was listed among the top ten books ten times and achieved fourth place. This makes the book the author's most successful publication to date. Contemporary criticism The apocalyptic writing style is frequently discussed in reviews of the book. Ursula März of Die Zeit finds the ability of this gloomy milieu study to evoke tenderness and empathy in the reader despite its brutality to be a colossal achievement. Carsten Otte in Der Tagesspiegel also attests to the novel's astonishing impact, despite its simple narrative premise and rabid doom-mongering. Dietmar Jacobsen of literaturkritik.de, however, describes the book as "perhaps one or two hundred pages too long". Eva Behrendt in Die Tageszeitung and Marlen Hobrack in Die Welt find that the characters in the book do not develop a personality, but are simply abandoned to their misery. For Philipp Theison in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung the book is hard to categorise and against everything that still believes in a blueprint for the future. Awards 2019: Swiss Book Prize Editions GRM. Brainfuck - 1st edition, 640 pages. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2019, . External links Interview about the book at Deutschlandfunk The book at Perlentaucher.de References German-language literature 21st-century literature Science fiction novels Dystopian novels