Every step we take can be the start of a whole new story.
BOY MEETS GIRL
by Julia Holbe
Penguin Germany/PRH Verlagsgruppe, March 2022
‘Boy meets girl’: anything can start with this sentence – there isn’t a story that cannot be brought into the world with it. For Nora, too, a brief encounter changes her life entirely. All of a sudden she realises that she has for too long been a mere visitor in her own life. Now the painful end of her marriage and her ageing father’s increasing helplessness finally inspire her to make changes.
When she meets Gregory, she senses that life has more in store for her – and yet she feels like there’s something missing, something she can’t quite grasp. Then she encounters Yann again, a friend from the old days, a man she thought she’d almost lost for ever.
Julia Holbe’s novel is about all those little life-changing moments and captures the magical seconds in which doubt and fear transform into hope, and something new is born. Boy Meets Girl is like a French film: light-footed, profound and unforgettable.
Julia Holbe was born in 1969 and lives in Frankfurt am Main but spends part of the year in Brittany. She spent twenty years working as an editor of international literature at the S. Fischer Verlag. Unsere glücklichen Tage (Our Happy Days), her first novel, was a top 20 Spiegel bestselling book.
Ines and Kirsten thought they would be best friends for ever. But their friendship is shattered when Ines isn’t there for Kirsten during a desperately difficult time. The two girls never meet again. Now, more than twenty years later, Ines is a working mother and trying her best to live up to the demands she places on herself. When an invitation to a school reunion awakens long-suppressed memories, she is forced to admit that the loss of the friend she once so admired has shaped her whole life. At the reunion, she suddenly finds herself standing in front of Kirsten. But their encounter doesn’t turn out as Ines expected – and she begins to question everything. Are the two women really who they thought they were?
Childhood friends Amalia, Josef, Gero and Bodo are on a summer canoeing trip. However, the moment they arrive at their destination it’s clear that they aren’t welcome. Josef in particular, who is black, senses the locals’ discomfort in his presence. They evidently deeply dislike anything that looks remotely foreign. But should the friends let themselves be intimidated by a few backward provincials? Should they simply give in? Amalia, Josef, Gero and Bodo are determined to stay, and from that moment on there’s no turning back. Every step they take leads them closer to the abyss. They all know that this trip won’t end well, but none of them wants to admit it. Soon their summer adventure becomes a desperate effort to get out of this place alive.
When the young parents Franziska and Coordt find a lovely – and affordable – flat in one of Munich’s best neighbourhoods, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. But there’s a condition attached: it won’t be just them and their small boy living there. Tempted by the chance of owning their own home, and one they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, they agree to a deal that will put their love to the test. Like a catalyst, the new flat accelerates and deepens existing cracks in their relationship, and their son, too, is aware of the increasing friction between them. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has turned out to be a trap. Will they find a way out?
A stinging, elegiac snapshot of contemporary Los Angeles, told, you guessed it, from the perspective of a queer, dangerously hungry mountain lion, isolated and struggling to survive in a drought-devastated Griffith Park. As it protects the precarious welfare of a nearby homeless encampment from its thicket, it confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, taking us on a tour that spans the city’s cruel inequalities to the toll of climate grief, all while grappling with the complexities of its own gender identity and memories of a vicious, absent father.