Somewhere deep in the European forest they meet. Frontier workers, smugglers, refugees, workers, asylum seekers, Inspectors, artists, musicians, actors, journalists, scholarship holders, logisticians, students and ghosts. They come from everywhere. They are all representatives of our time and they have conversations about origins and justice; body and state; import and export; homeland and migration. They talk together about happiness, music and death. In shift sleeper, Swiss writer dorothee elmiger has produced a novel that sheds light on the controversial issues of our time, finding a new language for this conversation previously unheard in contemporary German literature.