Sitting in the Thicket, Crying

A touching debut novel about mothers and daughters

When her mother falls ill with cancer, and her 16-year-old son wants to attend school in England for a year, Valerie finds herself wedged between two existential conflicts. While she would like to break free from the dysfunctional relationship with her mother, she is not permitted to do so; she has to let go of the child that has been the center of her life for more than fifteen years, but she’s not ready to do that either. Yet every conflict has its backstory. Beginning with the childhood of Valerie’s grandmothers, the author sheds light on the family’s past, gradually revealing an intergenerational portrait of its women and focusing on the novel’s central themes of saying farewell to loved ones, a longing to remain unscathed, and the desire ultimately to escape the baggage of one’s own legacy.

To what extent do family entanglements determine our lives, and how can we extricate ourselves?

An examination of the traits society has attributed to women and mothers over the course of a century

A haunting, finely nuanced portrayal of the many contradictory facets of motherhood – and daughterhood

Recommended by New Books in German (Autumn 2024)