Reading & talk: Hannah Häffner - The Giants

Three women, three generations - wild, poetic and beautiful, like the Black Forest in which the story is set.

'She is skinny, like a coat hook, bent into a human shape. Thin and strong and elongated: no one is taller than her, not in the village and not in the next one either. And the copper wool hair that reaches furiously for the sky. Anyone who sees her knows who she is, you know it immediately, and she hates it, hates it, hates it. Maybe in another place, at another time, she could have loved it too, but that's not possible, not here.'

Wittenmoos, a small village in the Black Forest, is home to three women. Tall and thin, they tower over everyone else and don't want to fit into the village community at all. And yet they are rooted here and have to find their own way within the narrow confines of the village. Liese, who quietly and relentlessly runs the butcher's shop. Cora, her daughter, the angry one, who will break out and has to learn that returning home is not a defeat. And Eva, Cora's daughter, who loves the forest so much and must first become aware of it. Hannah Häffner tells the story of three women, spanning from the 1960s to the present day, with stylistic precision, fine humor and a subtle gift for observation in dark, lush but also delicate poetry.

Hannah Häffner, born in Heidelberg, studied political science in Passau, Constance and Paris. She then began working as an advertising copywriter and at the same time devoted herself increasingly to writing. After three coastal crime novels, "Die Riesinnen" is now her literary debut. Today she lives with her family as a freelance copywriter and author near Stuttgart.