The central character in Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a recently retired widower professor of classical philology who grew up in East Berlin then went on to have a comfortable middle class life in unified Germany. For reasons that aren't quite clear, he becomes interested in the African refugees in Berlin and ends up befriending a group of them. His acquaintance with the refugees begins to alter (to broaden really) his worldview and give his life – which seemed to be drifting toward purposelessness on his retirement – a new vitality. While the book addresses the tragic histories and frustrating realities of the refugees, it does so in a very quiet way. These stories – Richard's and the refugees' – could have been told very differently. They could have been action rather than memory (a two-star review on Goodreads describes the prose as "communist grey") – but the way they were told worked for me. I loved the quiet, meditative feeling of this book.
*I realize I say something like this often in these posts. I prefer to read books knowing as little as possible about them ahead of time. I almost never read the plot summaries on the back covers of books. If I do, I try to just read the first sentence. Instead, I'll read the first page to get a sense of the writing.
