The women of the famous oatmeal dynasty have been fighting for more than half a century – for their lives, and for happiness.
DAS HAUS KÖLLN
(The Family Kölln Trilogy)
by Elke Becker
Heyne, 2024
Book 1: GLÄNZENDE ZEITEN (Golden Age, January 2024)
North Germany, 1886: The life of Charlotte Kölln’s husband is tragically cut short by an accident at work. There is no time for Charlotte to grieve, though, because the gristmill has to keep grinding, otherwise her family will face ruin. As a woman, Charlotte can neither get credit nor officially run the business, but she doesn’t let that stop her. When her eldest son announces that he plans to marry one of the workers, Bertha, Charlotte isn’t pleased. She is worried about her family’s status, which she wants to preserve at all costs. The two headstrong women must find a way to get along – and in the process realise that they can do anything, so long as they stick together.
Book 2: GROSSE HOFFNUNG (A New Hope, April 2024)
The sequel to the exciting family saga about the legendary oatmeal dynasty.
Northern Germany, 1912. Bertha Kölln’s new breakfast oatmeal is a huge success, and her family is working tirelessly to increase production. But then the Great War arrives in the sleepy little town near Hamburg, and the Kölln family, too, is affected. But they refuse to be broken, either by the war or by several accidents that have occurred in the mill. When Bertha’s son Peter marries the young bohemian Else Voormann, the couple don’t have it easy: Peter doesn’t understand confident, decisive Else – and Else for her part doesn’t trust her husband, who is spending far too much time with a pretty seamstress. Once again, two very different women must decide: will they fight each other, or stick together?
Elke Becker yearned for the sea and adventure, and travelled all over the world before settling down on Mallorca in 2005. The idea to write about the real-life Kölln family came to her over breakfast one day, as she was eating a bowl of the famous Kölln oatmeal; so she set off on a research trip to northern Germany, a beautiful place which has always been dear to her heart.
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We sometimes worry that we’ve been a coward, hesitated too long – and missed out on something that would have made us a better, happier person, with better-looking and more fun pets and partners. This is what Stanišić’s new stories are about: the constant, gnawing feeling that maybe you should have taken the road less travelled, made the less obvious choice, told a lie for once. Like the cleaner, for instance, who, holding a goat’s-hair brush in their hands, finally decides to take the matter of life into their own hands too. Or like the author who travels to Heligoland for the first time, only to discover that he’s actually been there before. Or like the father who’s prepared to cheat, if that’s what it takes to finally beat his eight-year-old son at Memory…
In 1926, full of hope and longing, the ambitious young sculptor Constantin Avis moves to New York. A famous gallery owner wants to take him under his wing and facilitate his great breakthrough in this city of dreams. Constantin floats through his new life buoyed by an exciting new love affair, and the prospect of success – but threatens to lose touch with reality. How far can his art really take him? A whole century later, this is the question that Dora sets out to answer. It is early springtime on the Ligurian coast, and she is working on a novel about Constantin. She has moved here together with her son and a nanny, to find the peace that usually eludes her in her everyday life as an artist and mother. But the deeper she dives, the more her own story becomes intertwined with Constantin’s. Eventually, she realises that she can answer the sculptor’s questions only with her own life. An exceptionally charming tale of the unbreakable bond between art and life – as light as a feather, and yet so powerful that its thoughts will linger with you for a long time.
Paula grew up in Minsk, was sent to New York when she was young, dreamt of studying medicine and was a committed anarchist. But then she met her future husband, the founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion – and at the end of her life, she finds herself in a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. Her husband is expecting the arrival of his friend, Konrad Adenauer, who has just resigned as German Chancellor. Once again, it is down to Paula to organise the visit and arrange everything. Poverty, war, motherhood, and – again and again – loneliness: this novel is a memorial to a strong, courageous woman, who had to make many compromises in life, and became the First Lady of a country in which she did not believe. And who, even in old age, never stops doubting, searching and hoping.