book tips
4 romance novels to touch your heart this summer
© Drobot Dean / Adobe Stock
The summer can come! The BRIGITTE editorial team has selected their favorite books for the most beautiful hours by the water, in the meadow, in a deckchair – and wishes: Have fun immersing yourself in wonderful romance novels!
Miranda Cowley Heller – The Paper Palace ©PR
Some decisions are too big for one person. Narrated by Miranda Cowley Heller 24 hours in Elle’s lifethat change everything and mean that she has to choose: between her childhood sweetheart Jonas, with whom she shares a fateful experience, but also passion and lust. And her husband Peter, with whom she has three children and has actually been happily married for 20 years. Miranda Cowley Heller deftly weaves the details of that day with flashbacks that explain how it came to this. About Elle’s childhood in a family where separations and new partners were normal, about difficult patchwork constellations, the chaotic mother and the unreliable father. And from all of them experiences and upheavalsthat brought you to this moment. The novel grabs me and won’t let go. Because, as Heller describes it: “Elle decides between a great love and a great love. There is no wrong choice, which also means that there is no good choice.” Life is a bitch. Once in a while. Luckily in this case only in the novel, which I couldn’t put down for many hours.
Ü: Susanne Höbel, 448 p., 23.99 euros, Ullstein
Annika Busing – Nordstadt ©PR
There’s Nene, lifeguard with a violent father. And there is Boris swimming with her to exercise his crippled legs. The story of the two could be difficult. But Annika Büsing tells them with so much humor and compassionthat I feel comfortably warm – because love makes life easier, even if fate has pushed you to the fringes of society.
128 p., 20 euros, Steidl
Heidi Sævareid – At the end of the polar night ©PR
Eyvar and Finn move with their daughters to Svalbard, where Finn works as a doctor in a coal mine. Always on the edge of what she can endure, Eyvar tries to den Everyday life in cold and gloom to master. But the long winters without light do something to her – and to her marriage. Oppressive and haunting at the same time.
Ü: Karoline Hippe, 350 p., 23 euros, island
Elvira Sastre – The days without you ©PR
This novel tells two stories in one: Dora’s life during the Spanish Civil War in love with her student, and that of her grandson Gael, whose love for Marta is not enough to heal the scars of her childhood. Or three? Because of course everything is connected. With Elvira Sastre, love is intoxication and the abyss at the same time.
Ü: Anja Rüdiger, 304 p., 22 euros, Thiele
Francesca Reece – A French Summer ©PR
Leah types them Diaries of the writer Michael – and dives ever deeper into his self-destructive thoughts, his excesses, his love for Astrid, who resembles her so much. She is faced with the question: How reliable are memories? And what is bent to be able to endure the truth?
Ü: J. Gräbener-Müller, T. Schnettler, 448 p., 24 euros, S. Fischer