Changes

|title=The Valley of Unknowing

|sort=Valley of Unknowing, The

|publisher=Vintage

|date=April 2013

|website=http://www.philipsington.com/

|summary=Love and betrayal in the last years of the GDR. An East German writer falls in love with a Western musician. Any future they might contrive together is complicated by the arrival of a mysterious manuscript and the sudden death of a mutual acquaintance.

}}

In the mid-to-late eighties the German Democratic Republic looked like enduring. Bolstered by a system of ''Mitarbeiter'' (''fellow workers'' is a much more amenable term than ''informers'') the Stasi kept their populace in check. Western media was easy to censor in those days. Border controls were brutal. People were shot on a regular basis trying to cross the no-man's-land into West Berlin and along the other inner German borders.