Ralf Rothmann Junges Licht (Young Light) Suhrkamp Verlag, August 2004. 240 pp. ISBN 3-518-41640-5 Set in the Ruhr in the 1960s, and told by a miner’s young son, Julian Collien, this novel is not only a moving tale of a sensitive boy as he approaches adolescence but also an unforgettable picture of life in a mining village at that time, both above and below ground. Julian lives with his parents and younger sister on the first floor of a cottage belonging to their shady landlord, Gorny, and his sexually precocious fifteenyear-old stepdaughter, Marusha. When Julian’s mother and sister go off on holiday, father and son are left behind to fend for themselves. The two rub along well. Walter works night shifts, Julian can roam the surrounding countryside, watch television, and visit the hut of the ‘Animal Club’ where he and a group of boys keep an odd assortment of pets. Julian is not fully at ease with these other kids, and has to bribe them with cigarettes and beer bought on his mother’s household tab. He gets on better with an old widower, Pomrehn, who lives in a dilapidated dwelling on the outskirts of the town. There is also something less than idyllic going on beneath the surface – both literally and metaphorically – of this apparently well-balanced community. Marousha’s sexuality becomes increasingly obtrusive, Gorny comes near to molesting Julian, and down below disaster strikes with the collapse of a hanging wall. By the end of the book, Julian has witnessed his father having sex with Marousha, and Gorny has had the family turned out of the cottage. But beneath these dramatic events the book has another layer – a series of mysterious and wonderfully poetic passages depicting the scenes in the very depths of the mine, where the darkness is so intense that the coal itself seems to take on a brilliance that illuminates a deeper black. Rothman has crafted a dense, poetic and melancholy story with passages that feed on the tradition of German romanticism. He has long been established as one of Germany’s leading novelists, and this may well be judged to be his best book yet.