A witty and warm-hearted novel about an unusual family

WENN DAS LEBEN DIR EINE SCHILDKRÖTE SCHENKT
by Heike Duken
Limes, November 2019

Charly is dead and Grandmother Frieda has invited everyone to the garden of the old villa for the burial. Charly, that was the family tortoise who had been with them for more than 40 years and with whom it all began. Anyway, all those years ago, the step-grandfather Heinrich brought Charly with him as a present for the children of Frieda, the woman he wanted to marry.
But the fact that Heinrich also brought secrets with him that he guarded longer than Charly would be alive was something nobody suspected in those days. And he is not the only one in this motley clan struggling with themselves and their fellow humans. So, everyone sets out to pay their last respects to Charly. It turns out to be a day on which everybody wants to bring something to a close and yet develops into a new beginning …
A story about fortune and misfortune, about lost and adopted sons, a grandfather who isn’t one and the question of what holds a family together from within. It tells of the highs and lows of a family and the hope that in the end everything will turn out well. For readers of Mariana Leky and Alexandra Fröhlich.

Heike Duken, born in 1966, studied psychology and is a psychotherapist in her own practice. She has been writing ever since she could read the letters of the alphabet, and her first book was a pirate story she wrote in grade three.