I’ve read some highly memorable books this year, not least Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk: a strange and intoxicating tale of female potency that plays out on the searing Mediterranean coast and offers a heady cocktail of sun, sea, sex and… jellyfish. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a beautifully written novel that fascinated and moved me in equal measure, the story of a blind girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Dunkelgrün fast schwarz (‘Dark Green, Almost Black’), the psychological thriller from Austrian author Mareike Fallwickl, had me gripped from the outset. Late one night Moritz and his pregnant girlfriend have an unexpected visitor. Moritz’s childhood friend Raf, charming, arrogant and somehow sinister, whom Moritz has not seen for years, invites himself in and proceeds to make himself at home. A suspenseful and fast-paced story of tangled relationships and buried secrets unfolds, unfortunately not yet available in English.
Deborah Levy, Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, 2016)
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (4th Estate, 2015)
Mareike Fallwickl, Dunkelgrün fast schwarz (Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2018)
Read the NBG review here: http://www.new-books-in-german.com/dark-green-almost-black
Jackie Smith is a translator from German and French, and the winner of the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize 2017.
