Reticent college graduate Ben Markovits moves from America to small-town Bavaria to play in a second division basketball team, has a sweet but less than wholehearted affair with a teammate’s ex-wife and thinks about writing a novel in which nothing much happens. Admittedly, the (many) basketball sequences flew over my head (sorry), though I felt a vicarious adrenaline rush by the end. But that truly didn’t matter because Markovits is a wonderful writer who’s attuned to (inter alia) the peculiar rhythms of work/not work, subtle shifts in relationships — and, above all, the sweet expanse of loneliness in which we linger at the threshold of adulthood. Here, as in Weekend in New York, Markovits is interested in talented people who drift into a sort of highly accomplished mediocrity (after all, second-rate professional basketball players are probably far better at what they do than most of us are at anything). From this perspective, there’s something fitting about the fact that Markovits’ exquisitely perceptive novels seem to be pretty obscure, at least in the U.S.  Of course, I hope that my review will do a tiny bit to change that :)