The Misfortune of Other People

English sample translation by Eleanor Collins available
Friedrich Hölderlin Sponsorship Award 2017
Grimmelshausen Award for Young Talents 2019

»As is generally known, death isn’t the end, but the beginning. In this book, it’s the beginning of a family comedy, which in turn has one of the best endings I’ve ever read.« – Alina Bronsky

Bad mothers, paternal wounds, sibling love. In her astonishing debut, Nele Pollatschek tells a turbulent, extremely funny and deeply sad story of the fate of having a family.

Thene, 25 years old, an Oxford student with a second home in Heidelberg, is basically living her dream: driving to her favorite clearing in the Odenwald forest with her boyfriend in an old BMW, setting up the folding table, reading, writing, now and then eating a piece of cherry pie. Unfortunately, time and again, Thene’s Odenwald idyll is invaded by something she can only handle in small doses: her patchwork family, an East-West-German mishpocha spread out all over the map. At the head of the pack, her mother Astrid – world savior, punk, highly manipulative and more interested in her good deeds than in her children. Then there’s Georg, her father, who actually would have been the better mother had he not disappeared for five whole years when Thene was ten. The others: a throng of rejected stepfathers, including Menachem, an Orthodox Jew. And – the only ray of light – Menachem’s son: Thene’s fifteen-year-old half-brother Eli, a sorcerer’s apprentice and exceptionally gifted expert on statistics, probability and magic.

When it’s time for Thene to accept her master’s degree from Oxford, her family shows up as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Who could have guessed that chance – fate? God? – would decide to intervene at this very moment to shake up Thene’s world…