Set in West Berlin in the early nineteen seventies, The Inclination follows a small group of artists preparing a play in a borrowed flat. Arnold directs. Michael observes. Nancy manages what cannot be named. Olivia performs. The work is provisional and carefully contained.

​

As attention enters, nothing is explicitly forbidden. Instead, behaviour shifts. Language tightens. Decisions narrow. Efficiency replaces curiosity. Control begins to resemble care. The conditions for continuation erode without confrontation.

​

Told through quiet observation rather than spectacle, the novel traces a movement from rehearsal to exposure, from collapse to dispersal, and finally to departure. It is a study of pressure rather than conflict, of how creative work thins not under censorship but under scrutiny, and of how endings arrive without drama.

​

Spare and precise in tone, The Inclination is a novel of rooms, gestures, silence, and proportion, about what happens when permission itself becomes the pressure.