Read. Talk. Share.
Read our book of the month and join us for a discussion online! Simply register via Eventbrite to receive the Zoom access info. Let's keep reading and sharing experiences with the material!
Book Klub is free and open to everyone interested, but participants must purchase the individual texts themselves and are expected to have read the title to be discussed prior to the meeting.
Feel free to read this month’s selection in English or its original German. The discussion will be in English.
Registration
About the novel:
Their names are Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde. They grew up within the borders of the GDR, and now, after the fall of the Wall, they want everything. They achieve a lot, but they must always grapple with their roles as women: Do you have to please? Do you have to be pleasing? Is being alone an option, or is one only a real woman with a husband or family? And how can love work in times like these?
Paula meets her future husband on a hot summer evening. They marry and have a child, but the child dies, and the boundless grief takes everything away. Judith, Paula's best friend, an established doctor—a cultivated woman, sure of herself—searches for her dream men through her bed. Behind her ironic detachment is an almost girlish desire for tender love. Then she gets pregnant by the right man at the wrong time and secretly aborts the child. Brida is a writer and a woman who wanted it all, who got caught between her love for her children and her inner need to write. Malika was a promising violinist as a teenager, but her hope for a great career fades, as does her hope for a family and children, when her husband leaves her. But then Jorinde appears, Malika's younger sister, successful and interesting, who has everything Malika does not, and makes her sister an outrageous offer.
About the author:
© Maurice Haas / Diogenes Verlag
Daniela Krien was born in 1975 in Neu-Kaliß and studied Cultural, Communication, and Media Studies in Leipzig. She has been a freelance author since 2010 and published her first novel,
Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (German:
Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen), in 2011. She lives in Leipzig with her two daughters.
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