Book trends fall 2022
The best family stories
© Alina / Adobe Stock
No matter where the temperatures are heading – a good book warms the soul. Here are our favorite family stories.
Anna Kim – Story of a Child
In 1953 a baby was put up for adoption in Wisconsin. This turns out to be complicated because the authorities want to use all their might to determine the boy’s origins, the father could have been African American. Anna Kim links this story to that of a writer from Vienna who is investigating the case. What moves them to think about their own mother, who went back to Korea alone. An artfully nested question game that gives an insight into our ideas of origin.
220 p., 23 eurosSuhrkamp
Daniela Raimondi – On the shores of Stellata
If you’re looking for a classic family novel, this is it. This story, which begins with heavy rains laying down a wandering people in Lombardy and thus the union of Giacomo and Viollca, extends far beyond their offspring blessed with strange gifts and ideas. This debut novel by a poet who only turned to prose when she was over 60 is as mysteriously glowing as its cover.
Ü: Judith Schwaab, 512 p., 23.99 eurosUllstein
Katja Schönherr – Everything is still not enough
Even her debut was a bang: In “Martha and Arthur” a woman took revenge posthumously on her husband for a loveless marriage. In her second novel, Katja Schönherr explores disappointments again, this time in the family circle. When mother Inge, 84, falls, her son Carsten from Berlin has to go back to the East German province and take care of himself – even if remote work only works so-so, since the internet is practically non-existent in the village. He has his daughter Lissa, a climate campaigner, with him. Their mother Sabine is just expanding a house with her new son, so Lissa prefers to go to grandma’s, even if she is a reproachful person, always offended by life and her children. Schönherr masterfully draws the image of a dysfunctional family, which also stands for the relationship between West and East Germany, between the capital and the village. Extremely entertaining to read and thought-provoking at the same time.
320 p., 23 eurosArk
Przemek Zybowski – The pink wedding book
1984 in Poland: A little boy comes home from summer camp, but his parents don’t pick him up. You fled to Germany with his younger sister. Years later he returns to his home village, the grandmother with whom he lived until he left the country has died, and the rest of the family is also there… Zybowski tells the story of a major injury and of the Growing up in a Poland that no longer exists.
224 p., 22 eurosLuchterhand
Shirley Jackson – Riot and Cookies
“Life Among The Savages” – Jackson, who otherwise publishes in the horror genre, called this 1953 book in English. As ’50s motherhood and horror seem to fall under the same heading, the episodic depictions of a tumultuous family in a big old house make for a tremendous read. And show us that in terms of care work not that much has changed in the last 70 years.
Ü: Nicole Seifert, 256 p., 23 eurosArk