review
A powerful and formally inventive novel about love, addiction and the stories we tell in order to survive, ‘Imbalance’ explores the emotional aftermath of a destructive relationship through the act of writing itself. Swiss author Sarah Elena Müller combines lyrical prose with psychological insight to create an intimate portrait of dependency, memory and artistic creation.
Alice loves Rio, but Rio loves meth. Ten years her senior, he drifts between periods of fragile stability and prolonged disappearances into a self-destructive world of drugs and crime. While he vanishes for days at a time, Alice waits, holding together the precarious framework of their shared life: earning enough money to pay the bills, keeping food on the table and hoping each phone call might bring him home. Even as she recognises the impossible nature of their relationship, she cannot bring herself to leave. Seven years later, with Rio sober and trying to rebuild his life, Alice begins writing a novel about their time together. As the two revisit the past, their memories diverge, omissions emerge and uncomfortable questions surface about what really happened, what has been forgotten, and whether a story can ever fully capture the truth of a relationship shaped by addiction.
Müller turns the process of storytelling into part of the story. The narrative moves between the final year of Alice and Rio’s relationship and the present day, where Alice struggles to transform lived experience into fiction. As Rio disputes her recollections and Alice reshapes events through literary imagination, the novel explores the uneasy relationship between memory and invention. Trauma, abuse and emotional dependency remain deliberately elusive, emerging through recurring images, symbols and shared private rituals rather than direct explanation. This ambiguity gives the novel its distinctive emotional power, inviting readers to inhabit the uncertainty that defines both memory and love.
Müller writes with remarkable sensitivity, balancing poetic language with moments of startling emotional directness. The first-person narration draws readers into Alice’s conflicted inner world, while recurring motifs – cats, bread, road journeys and artistic performance – create a rich symbolic landscape. Although its subject matter is dark, the novel never loses sight of the redemptive possibilities of friendship and creativity.
Following the award-winning success of her debut novel, ‘Picture without Girl’, Müller confirms herself as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Swiss literature. ‘Imbalance’ will appeal to readers of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation for its unflinching exploration of emotional dependency and the way in which it transforms a personal crisis into compelling literary fiction.
Find out more: https://www.limmatverlag.ch/programm/titel/unwucht.html?highlight=WyJ1bnd1Y2h0Il0=
All recommendations from Autumn 2026