Bianca Döring Little Alien dtv premium, October 2000, 235 pp. ISBN 3-423-24220-5 Alien is right - 'Sting' title or no. Ellie, the narrator of this fast-moving yet disturbing story, billed by its German publishers as a 'tragicomedy', turns her back on her unhappy village childhood for the bright city lights of Berlin. But she cannot escape the trauma of her past - it just takes a different shape. The book begins with Ellie spending her first night hiding in the cathedral, for want of a better place to go. On waking she thinks of angels. There are angel sculptures in the church, and she will continue seeing angels throughout most of the book. Sometimes they seem to be guardian angels, sometimes fallen and threatening angels. Here is alienation on a permanent and tragic scale. It dominates her love for Luciano, with his amber-coloured eyes, whom she first sees while looking in at the window of a restaurant. It is equally a factor in her very different feeling for Willi, a piano player in a bar, with whom, for a brief time, she teams up as a singer. But while she looks to Luciano as the dream man who may be her salvation, she cannot resist the cruel and dangerous Willi, who becomes obsessed by her and finally rapes her. Masochistic as well as adrift, she lacks the self-respect and strength to protect herself, and even after her dreadful violation, with her body a mass of bruises, she feels in a sense that the experience was unreal. 'Looking into the mirror, I saw the alien', she writes. Luciano too fails her, disappearing after once making love. Only Luise, her best friend from the village, does her supportive best. The story comes full circle as Ellie ends in the cathedral where everything began, abandoned by her city 'friends', disillusioned in her search for love, homeless, her narrative becoming increasingly fragmented as reality recedes. This novel with its poetic prose draws the reader, with Ellie, into the strange and sad world of the metropolis where, in James Joyce's words, the inhabitants suffer from 'the soul's incurable loneliness'.