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Love in Five Acts
Five women attempt the impossible – to love, to be strong, and to stay true to themselves.
Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn’t stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the “perfect” man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone?
Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice.
Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.
Spiegel #1 bestseller More than 150,000 copies sold in Germany
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
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Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn’t stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the “perfect” man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone?
Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice.
Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.
Spiegel #1 bestseller More than 150,000 copies sold in Germany
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
Reviews
It's the book of the summer
Maybe that is the artistry, the literary concept of Daniela Krien, the familiar truthfulness of her characters, their touching intimacy
With psychological refinement Daniela Krien recounts the chaos of feelings and the short half-life of modern ways of living
She is a good listener, [...] Maybe this is why her novel Love in Five Acts is so entertaining
Krien expertly connects fortunes that only seem simple at first glance to create an altogether excellent book
Daniela Krien is an impressive storyteller for emergency case called love, which silences many of us. Daniela Krien gives them a strong voice
The polyphony and the way in which every single voice is being led midway between the protagonist and the narrator constitute the special quality of this book
Few intelligently entertaining German novels don't ooze relevance yet are not afraid of existential seriousness. Fortunately, Krien has written one
Nothing in this life is for free. And this is why this book entertains and is food for thought, with remarkable women in their thirties and forties