Mariana Leky Liebesperlen (Love Pearls) DuMont Buchverlag, September 2001. 108pp. ISBN 3-7701-5873-3 This book was brought to the attention of new books in german by someone who is professionally experienced at talent spotting. Our reader agrees that it is a book with outstanding qualities, and adds that the writing is a delight. There are nine stories in all. Each is self-contained, but because they are all first-person narratives and the voice is always that of a young woman (like the author herself) the collection is homogeneous and reads like a set of autobiographical accounts. It is only the fact that the last four in the book look back the furthest into the narrator's youth which shows that they are not intended to have a strict chronological link. The narrator of the title story recalls a family holiday in Morocco when she and her mother tried, but failed, to save the life of a starving kitten. In another tale, a girl is treated as an adult for the first time on her thirteenth birthday. In Max lacht (Max Laughs) the woman, who works in a bookshop, always sells Herr Kirschbaum a maths book with a red cover on Tuesdays - until she decides to be more adventurous and offer Anna Karenina, which is bound in pink. What these monologues have in common is that the persons speaking are naive and pitiful yet at the same time provoke a smile. There is a Chaplinesque quality about them. They are weak and put-upon but totally indestructible. In visual terms, each story is like a watercolour by Paul Klee, delicately drawn and subtly coloured so that within its modest physical dimensions - the stories are each only two or three thousand words long - the reader/observer is given as much to look at as in many paintings that take up a whole wall. Neurotic, scatterbrained jerky, quirky, and often very funny - the collection is all these things. Which British publisher will give this author her first chance?