Reading & talk: Dita Zipfel - It's light and outside the world is turning

A powerful and abysmal novel, as angry as it is tender, about female self-determination, about bodies and who they belong to, about having children and the longing for them.

After this vacation, the plan is that Linn will have a perfectly mature embryo implanted and she will be what she has long wanted: pregnant. Her partner's childhood friend and wealthy self-made man Felix has invited them both to the chic bungalow on the beach. While Matze and Felix get drunk on crémant, go fishing and try to ignore the differences in status between them, the women watch each other from a distance. Linn, torn between the unconditional desire to become a mother and the doubt as to whether she can be a "good" mother at all, looks with a mixture of envy and disgust at Eva, who patiently burrows with her son, creams and comforts him and wipes grains of sand out of baby's eyes. But over the course of the vacation days, between whispered conversations and secret smoking of pot, a closeness develops that shakes up entrenched images. Eva and Linn gently shift the rules and become more than friends: They become allies.

Dita Zipfel was born in Kiel and writes plays, screenplays, essays and literature for children and adults. In 2020, she was awarded the German Youth Literature Prize for her young adult novel "Wie der Wahnsinn mir die Welt". Her books have been translated into numerous languages. She writes stories that are a bit like movies, perhaps because she taught herself storytelling at her grandfather's movie theater.