Tomer Gardi’s high-speed novel about food delivery riders  At Their Mercy

Their enormous backpacks are impossible to overlook. Their faces, however, are quickly forgotten: food delivery riders navigating the streets on two wheels. Tomer Gardi follows them through Tel Aviv, Berlin and other metropolitan hubs, weaving stories of precarious labour and global exploitation, but also of solidarity, perseverance and hope.

The main characters in Tomer Gardi's Liefern (Delivering) are people who rarely take center stage in novels: food delivery cyclists. They race through cities on every continent, rush up and down staircases, battle against the clock, against competition, degrading working conditions, and deadly traffic, all because comfortable consumers do not feel like cooking or leaving their homes. These "riders" may be unusual protagonists, but Gardi shows how best to approach them poetically: The tone is established on the very first page of the novel: no sentimentality, but close attention is required. Away from conventional narrative patterns and self-absorption, and toward an unvarnished, global examination of our dependence on people who occupy the lower rungs of the service pyramid. Algorithms, ratings, and other exploitative mechanisms shape both their working lives and their everyday existence. Yet they continue to fight, preserving their determination, humor, desires, and affection for others.

Last Resort: A Bicycle

The narrative begins with the story of Filmon from Eritrea. Until recently, he worked as a kitchen assistant in a café in Tel Aviv. But the café is forced to shut down due to poor business. Filmon urgently needs a new job, even though he lacks a work permit. He must not only support himself but also regularly send money to Berlin, where his wife and daughter have managed to flee. Through his landlord, who is involved in various shady dealings, he obtains a not entirely legal delivery license from the delivery service Indie-Go. He plunges into the stressful world of food delivery like a non-swimmer thrown into cold water. His goal is a German passport, so that the process of family reunification can finally begin.

The next narrative thread takes us to Berlin and India. Nina, the German teacher of Filmon's wife Daniat, leaves the German capital for an exchange semester in Delhi. There she falls in love with Ramón, a student from Buenos Aires, in a holiday romance that ends sadly. She also has a brief encounter with Sachin and Vivaan, a mother and son who deliver food together because Sachin's husband has disappeared, leaving her to support both herself and her son alone despite all the dangers that riders face in a city like Delhi. But regardless: The worse the ranking, the lower the earnings; the lower the earnings, the faster deliveries must be made. Again and again, Tomer Gardi inserts these glimpses into the riders' daily working lives, not in a voice of indignation but in a matter-of-fact, almost casual tone, which only heightens their impact.

A Literary Journey Around the World

Tomer Gardi continues weaving his narrative thread. We accompany the first-person narrator and his close friend to Istanbul, known as the mecca of hair transplantation. These two men also want to "rejuvenate" themselves there, in an absurdly comic episode enriched by the adventurous story of Resut, who originally wanted to become a teacher but saw no realistic chance of finding a position. As a result, he ends up working as a delivery rider. Through solidarity and collective struggle, however, he manages to push back against the exhausting working conditions: As with all the people mentioned, Tomer Gardi zooms into and out of several lives, sometimes one after another, sometimes side by side. One of these lives is Pavan's. Originally from India, he battles ice, snow, stairwells, and a broken e-bike during Berlin's harsh winter. There he finds in Filmon, who has finally arrived in Germany, a supportive colleague and friend.

We also meet Ciervo, a bicycle courier in Buenos Aires, who has obtained Ramón's cell phone through a series of circumstances after Ramón's accident. He desperately needs the phone for his work. The book's final chapter bears the poetic title "Roses." Yet there is little that is flowery about it. The setting is a rose farm in Naivasha, Kenya, where young Akiny struggles to earn a living through grueling piecework. She quickly learns that doing a good job is only one building block in escaping poverty. Getting to know a foreign NGO worker may prove even more useful. The book ends with the sentence: "Oh, hello," she said to him, "want to dance?"

Close to the Present

Tomer Gardi has achieved the remarkable feat of transforming a highly contemporary, globally relevant socio-political issue into a novel that neither lectures nor moralizes. Yet it clearly and unsentimentally demonstrates how an exploitative system functions, in part because it is accepted as "normal." The lovingly and empathetically drawn characters, who pass through both bright and dark times, who are flawed yet refuse to be defeated or stripped of their dignity, remain sympathetic figures from the first page to the last.

Despite the gravity of its subject matter, Gardi writes with variety, accessibility, and a great deal of humor. It is therefore no surprise that the novel has earned a place on the longlist for the 2026 German Book Prize.

September 2026