Genre: Young Adult
Publication: March 11th, 2016
Pages: 464
Winnaar van de Duitse Jeugdliteratuurprijs 2016!
Charlotte Nowak, 15 and incredibly shy, reluctantly heads off to summer camp with seven other girls. When she gets there, she finds that things a very different to how she’d imagined. First, things start to go missing. And when their group leader completely loses her temper, the girls make their escape, stealing a dog catcher’s van (dogs included) in the process. Literally heading for the hills, one of the girls knows of an old disused mine. The group decides to seek refuge there. Each summer day they spend there seems to heighten their sense of freedom and excitement even further. The girls spend their days trekking through the woods, their nights scavenging supermarket storage containers. Charly Nowak slowly realises that there is a lot more to her than her shyness. But when the gang stumbles across an extraordinary relic of the old Communist East Germany and the real world threatens to catch up with them, Charly has to prove her mettle and display both her newly found courage and her loyalty to her new friends.
Kirsten Fuchs’ poignant and accomplished story creates a vibrant emotional landscape of discovery, filled with the hope, excitement and trepidation that accompany every newly won sense of freedom. With her first two novels praised to the skies by the press, her new book succeeds in creating “an extravagant mix of unvarnished drama, dry humour and intense tenderness.” (FAZ) A wonderfully mature novel about the big questions in life, the ones we ask most urgently when we’re young.
Kirsten Fuchs was born in 1977 in Karl-Marx-Stadt in the former GDR. Probably the best known and highly regarded woman in Berlin’s spoken word scene, she won the Open Mike literature competition in 2003. Since then, she has become a renowned writer of books not only for young people. Her acclaimed debut novel, The Titanic and Mister Berg, was published in 2005. 2008 saw the publication of her second book, Heal.