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Product Description
Winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize in 2023
On a dark night in Berlin’s Kastanienallee, acclaimed writer Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst — a chance encounter that begins an exploration of the fluid boundaries between truth and invention, memoir and fiction. Through three interconnected essays — in prose, precise yet dreamlike — Judith Hermann captures those moments when reality shifts: a friendship that unravels, salt-bright summers on the North Sea, an unconventional childhood, and the weight of familial trauma. Part literary meditation, part memoir, part novel, this work explores the delicate art of transforming life into literature, challenging our deepest and sometimes darkest assumptions about memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Very occasionally a book comes along that feels as if it were written just for me, and this is one of those rare books. All my life’s defining concerns, as a writer and a woman, are here – ageing, home, the past, losing people, secrets, childhood, strategies of disclosure, the purpose of art and the relationship it has to life – god, that is an ongoing riddle – and Hermann conveys and examines them with generosity and honesty and insight. This book stimulated my mind and touched me to the core.
Translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire.
