Larissa Boehning Schwalbensommer (A Swallow's Summer) Eichborn, August 2003. 159 pp. ISBN 3-8218-0736-9 This debut collection of short stories leaves you wanting more. The protagonists are generally young, unemployed, and drifting through life -- the disappointed children of the start-up generation. In a series of cryptically entitled stories -- 'Melon Belly', 'Matchstick Cathedral', 'Sealed Sea'… -- the author narrates tantalising snippets from their lives. The stories look away at the very moment when something has just happened or could be about to: writing in quiet, precise prose, Boehning focuses on the peripheral, the build-up and the uncertainty. The settings range from the German coast to Berlin and from Tel Aviv to Tucson, Arizona, and arouse simple human interest. But while they ostensibly revolve around minor events, the real focus is on relationships -- burgeoning, failing, unreciprocated or ended. The narrators' gender is often ambiguous, and the relationships too are characterised by uncertainty. Nothing is made explicit, and sex is only alluded to. And behind these tales lie other stories too. In 'Silent Fish, Sweetheart' we meet a Russian grandmother who was displaced during the war and refused to learn German. She adds to the book's atmosphere of veiled melancholy as she sings a Russian song about a sailor who has lost his ship and a captain who has 'lost his sea'. The sea and nautical allusions form a leitmotif within the text, and the final story is set on board a boat. Loss and lack of direction; transitoriness; fatalism -- these are universal themes. This book's achievement is to have brought them sparklingly up-to-date.