“Rina Schmeller […] writes with empathy but eschews all sentimentality, revealing not only the full horror of her situation, but also love in all its facets.” —Jenny Erpenbeck
CO by Rina Schmeller
Penguin Verlag/PRH Germany, March 2026
They met on a bridge. They recognised a kindred spirit in each other. They fell in love. And now they have decided to share their lives with each other, regardless of the drug to which he is addicted, and which will henceforth govern her life too. She becomes entangled in his addiction, and starts to orbit him like he orbits the drug, both calm centre and third party. She leaves again and again, to escape the violence, but always comes back. Almost always.
CO is a story about empathy and creeping self-sabotage, about the dynamics of addiction – which affects us all – and about what life is like when you’re co-dependent. Yet it is also the story of a woman’s empowerment and liberation, who finds the strength to let go. And as she embarks on the long and tough road to survival, she gradually regains her independence and finds her way back to herself. A powerful, elegant novel about regaining your inner freedom, sober, quiet and fiercely honest.
Rina Schmeller, born in 1986, studied creative writing in Leipzig and literary studies with comparative literature in Berlin. She has been awarded several fellowships and was a member of the 2020 prose writers’ workshop at the Literary Colloquium in Berlin. In 2024 she published the essay Bedeutung erleben (‘Experiencing meaning’, Edit no. 91) about writing « Co ».
Again and again, political and economic leaders act as if we can simply ignore the laws of nature, and like to think that technology can perform magic tricks à la Harry Potter. In « Nature Belongs to No Party », two physicists speak truth to power: they explain in clear terms that nature does not negotiate, is not a party member and won’t cede to our demands. What exactly do energy-efficiency and climate protection entail? Why does energy depreciate? And what policies would a government that understands how nature works adopt?
In 1990s Romania, the dust of socialism still hasn’t quite yet settled. Every summer Roxana and Camil meet in the small town of Busteni in the Carpathian Mountains: she is there on holiday, while he lives on the other side of the tracks. They observe the town’s couples, take inspiration from them and try to discover their secrets: from the successful lawyer who removes her roof when a tree starts growing through her house, to the chalk-and-cheese engineering couple who suffer from the same ailment, to the local beauty who looks like a TV star, who has found love with an unremarkable-seeming man. And with each successive summer, Roxana and Camil’s own story develops too – until they realise that they can only ever be a guest in each other’s lives.
There’s nothing for it: we have to do something to counter hardship and human suffering, war, poverty, fascism and the rest of it. Each of us can do their bit. Everyone. Donate stuff, help out somewhere, that sort of thing. Take responsibility. If the world’s going down the drain, we might as well go down with dignity, goddamn it.
Propagation is crucial for social cohesion and the survival of the human species, but in public discourse, actual experiences of being born and giving birth often remain in the dark. They are frequently considered a niche topic, with little social relevance. Barop’s brilliantly written feminist history traces this attitude back to a culture which to this day patronises and infantilises women during childbirth, and argues that violent births are the product of a long tradition of inequality and patriarchal structures. She takes us on a journey into the past, explodes myths and misconceptions, and interrogates our ideals and assumptions about what makes for a ‘normal birth’ – and reveals that births have changed constantly over the centuries, and that the woman and her baby have only recently been empowered and placed at the centre of the process.