Silke Scheuermann Die Stunde zwischen Hund und Wolf (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf) Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, January 2007, 174 pp ISBN: 978-3-89561-371-5 There are times when one hankers for the ‘good old days’ when over-enthusiastic tippling was still looked upon as a bit of a joke, à la Toby Belch in Twelfth Night or P.G. Wodehouse’s elbow-lifting uncles, and before it became alcoholism. And this thought might indeed cross one’s mind while reading Silke Scheuermann’s stark book if it were not so sensitively and indeed touchingly written. It is the story of two sisters, the narrator, the younger one, whose name is never given, and her older sibling, Ines, a talented artist, who suddenly wrecks her career and her life by taking to drink. Throughout the course of the narrative we gradually learn more about the two women’s relationship as the narrator becomes reluctantly drawn back into her sister’s life after a period of estrangement. The narrator had always considered Ines the cleverer and more beautiful of the two, and undoubtedly her father’s favourite, but reproached her for the mean way in which she had repaid her debt to him at the end. Ines was also, always, a past-mistress at using others. Now, in her sister’s trouble, the narrator feels once more an obligation to respond to Ines’s needs, and in coming to her rescue is forced to confront not only her own ambivalent attitude towards her sister but also their shared characteristics, not least their joint feelings of depression and lack of self-worth. The figures of dog and wolf, as chosen for the novel’s title, recur in the course of the narrative from time to time and once with brilliant effect, when Kai, Ines’s patient boyfriend and later the narrator’s lover, remarks that the phrase ‘the hour between dog and wolf’ (derived from the French phrase ‘l’heure entre chien et loup’ which refers to the twilight hour when day is not quite night), should more properly be ‘the “split second” between dog and wolf’, so violent and appalling does Ines’s behaviour become when the drink suddenly takes over. The author is a short story writer and also a poet, and the book has a lyrical ending as the narrator drives her sister through the beautiful, wooded Taunus area on the outskirts of Frankfurt on the way to the rehab clinic where Ines will perhaps be cured. This is a heartfelt novel which, despite its sad theme, many readers, women especially perhaps, will find illuminating and even uplifting.