Graphic Novel
November 2020: The Summer of Her Life

Looking back at one’s life. A poetic, touching and profound graphic novel.
 

“The Summer of Her Life” is the first collaboration between the comic artist Barbara Yelin and the novelist Thomas von Steinaecker. In a poetic, touching and profound way, it touches upon the topics that we seldom dare to touch on: What is it like to spend your twilight years in a home? How do you know whether you’ve made the right choices? And what does it mean, in the end, to be happy?

Gerda stands at the window of her nursing home, looking up at the stars. A simple question has been haunting her for years, but until now she’s managed to avoid it: has her life been a happy one?

As Gerda negotiates the degradations of old age and the indignity of being cared for by strangers, the past begins to seep into the present. Memories sweep over her. She remembers her life as a bespectacled school girl, bullied for being smart. She remembers her ambition to enter the closed and overwhelming male field of astrophysics. And she remembers, most powerfully, that one summer – the summer of her life – during which she would be forced to make the most difficult decision of all: between her career and the love of her life.

Now you have the chance to meet both authors online. As a collaboration with the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, Goethe-Institut Hongkong has invited Thomas von Steinaecker and Barbara Yelin for an online reading and discussion session on 14.11.2020 (Sat). More information can be found here.