Musician Sophie Hunger's debut novel  A friendship like a love song

Sophie Hunger has been touring the world as a successful musician for many years. Now she has written her first novel – about a close friendship, sustained by an exuberant love of music. And about a misfortune that seems inevitable.

Sophie Hunger: Her mother is Swiss lawyer and politician Myrtha Welti-Hunger, her father is diplomat Philippe Welti. Her grandfather was a reporter, author, actor and director. Constant changes of location – Bern, London, Bonn, Zurich – shaped her childhood, which was anything but ordinary given these family circumstances.

From song to novel

Her parents' enthusiasm for music rubbed off on their daughter: in 2008, Sophie Hunger – now a brilliant singer, musician, songwriter and film composer – made her breakthrough with the album Monday's Ghost. It included the successful track Walzer für niemand (Waltz for No One). And Sophie Hunger's debut novel is now also called Walzer für Niemand – deliberately so: “The idea for Walzer für Niemand came to me 20 years ago, but it had to be lived through first in order to be written about,” the artist explains in an interview. Writing requires a lot of distance – it took her a long time to muster this distance in order to make room for the words. “And now it was just ripe,” she affirms elsewhere.

This unconventional, peculiar coming-of-age novel begins with an ending. And with a beginning – the birth of the narrator: “As the last note faded away in the Bataclan and scattered figures became visible out of the darkness, I suddenly heard the sound of forceps from a long-ago night when my wedged little head was pulled out of my mother's stretched pelvic floor ... The shock with which it all began, where is it going?”

Together – apart

The narrator and her best friend Nobody don't know this yet when they – being diplomats' children – are sent from England to Switzerland and later elsewhere. The constants in their unsettled lives: the record player on the living room sideboard, their parents' record collection, the boundless experience of listening to music: “Something moved, everything changed, we became different. The sounds washed up entire landscapes, sublime stage sets ... only to irrevocably swallow every trace of themselves a few moments later.” The music envelops them, welds them together, they have no need for language – on the contrary: “We didn't like language as a means of denunciation at all. We only liked it in its nebulous, dreamlike form. ... It didn't bother us if we couldn't get to the point.”

Time does not stand still. The narrator and Nobody – who is always addressed as ‘you’ in the novel – drift apart: she writes songs, wants to move forward and into the public eye. He drifts into the past, exploring with increasing passion the history of the Walser, a resistant indigenous Swiss people, whose descendants include the narrator. The narrator can only speculate about the reason for this obsession, the results of which are reflected in short, highlighted chapters throughout the book: “Perhaps it was the beginning of your fight for me and, at the same time, the first sign of a separation. If the future belonged to me, then you had to be master of the past.”

Alone on stage

The narrator decides against the destructive potential of the boundary-dissolving intimacy between her and Nobody. She chooses her own path, with her own songs, her own music, and succeeds on stage. A feat of strength reminiscent of the Walser women's will to survive, who braved ice, cold and darkness. And which pulls the narrator out of her symbiotic relationship with Nobody. As she has long anticipated, he will sink into nothingness: “The impact of a body on the surface of the water causes concentric waves, rings that continue to spread long after the body has sunk and disappeared.”

Sensual power

Even the visual design of Sophie Hunger's novel is special: a feather-light drawing on a pastel-coloured cover – cloud pink transitions into sky blue, interspersed sketches of mostly naked female bodies bordering on abstraction, explanations about the Walser women in a different font. All of this can stand on its own, yet it all belongs together – rhythmic and intertwined like the songs on an album. Appropriately, the chapter headings are like the song titles of the artist Sophie Hunger. She found writing difficult: "When you play a chord, you immediately create an atmosphere. And when you're writing, it's incredibly difficult to achieve that. Music is much more sensual, much more physical too; writing is more abstract."

With her feel for rhythm and word melodies, her ability to observe closely and conjure up ever new and fresh images and moods, and her “somnambulistic” portrayal of the elusive character of Nobody, Sophie Hunger has succeeded in creating a thoroughly sensual novel about friendship and music – openly declared to be a work of fiction, but the parallels to the author's life are easy to spot. This ambiguity is intentional: “Literature is a game of hide-and-seek: what is reality and what is not?” Sophie Hunger states in the aforementioned interview. “I look forward to all the misunderstandings and unexpected games with these motifs.” Her readers can look forward to a melancholic, melodic debut from a distinctive musician, which, like a special song, has a long and glittering after-effect.

September 2025