Tanja Dückers Der längste Tag des Jahres (The Longest Day of the Year) Aufbau-Verlag, february 2006, 213 pp ISBN: 3-351-03068-1 Tanja Dückers emerged on the German literary scene in the mid-1990s and became identified with the group of young authors writing about hedonistic lifestyles, often in a quasi-autobiographical fashion and with the action set in post-unification Berlin. Her earlier short stories were written from a female perspective but in her two most recent novels, Himmelskörper and now Der längste Tag des Jahres she has impressively extended her thematic style and range, to become, with Karen Duve and Judith Hermann, both of whose work has been translated into English, one of the most interesting contemporary German women writers. This new novel revolves round the death of a family patriarch, on an extremely hot summer's day, and the reaction of his children to the news. Paul Kadereit made his fortune in prospering late-1950s Germany by setting up a pet shop filled only with exotic animals. The family home resembles, and has for many years, a dark grotto full of reminders of his fondness for wild life. It is 'a wilderness within', the desire to escape from which becomes the novel's central metaphor. The father himself can be perceived as escaping - in his case from the trauma of the Second World War, through which the family lost everything. One of the sons seeks refuge in the theatre, not very successfully. Another escapes to Berlin. One of the daughters works as a secretary, the other as a psychologist. All these children, like their father, have an almost compulsive need to compensate for a strong sense of confinement. Typical of their generation, they take refuge in new age groups, while their father marvels at the survival strategies, 'under the severest conditions', of his beloved animals from the safety of his armchair. There is also a 'lost son', once the most promising of all the children, who, abandoned by his wife and having given up his career, now lives in the Mojave desert. This is the final and finest section of a multi-layered and haunting book. The description of the desert landscape has a beautifully real, cinematic quality about it, and indeed throughout the whole novel the scenic descriptions are first-class. A multi-faceted family portrait of originality and great power.