Andreas Steinhöfel Die Mitte der Welt Carlsen Verlag, February 1998. 460 pp. Here's an opening for you! Having crossed the Atlantic unaccompanied, continued her journey by train, and arrived without finding anyone to meet her, a seventeen-year-old American girl, Grass, gives birth to twins in the open during a blizzard within sight of her destination, an isolated castle in an unidentified region of Germany, from which a young woman has emerged to assist in the delivery. Grass is told that her sister, the owner of the castle, has died, so she takes it over herself, and, aided by the same young woman, who was a friend of the dead sister, raises the twins, a boy and a girl. Flouting conventionality, she conducts a riotous life wth serial liasions, exposing the twins to outcast status as they grow up. Early on they are instilled with the awareness of their apartness yet secure in the small, supportive community that Grass collects around herself. Though Phil and his twin Dianne are the opposite of identical, both in appearance and personality, they are close in their early years. Growing up in the crumbling castle and its overgrown grounds, they have a wild and exotic childhood. They gradually drift apart after Phil meets Kat, the daughter of the local headmaster. In pre-adolescence, Phil is subjected to a test by a lesbian woman in his mother's circle. His inability to kick a football allegedly reveals that he is gay, though he is unaware of what this means. His gradual sexual awakening follows with the joys and pangs of first love. Told in forward and flashback narration, unaccountable events are ultimately clarified, and the mother, through a slow-growing but firm attachment in a loving relationship, at last gains the confidence to talk about the twins' father, a subject formerly taboo. Though marketed for young adults, this book has a wider appeal. It is witty, sensitive, humorous and lyrical.