The new novel by the German Book Prize winner 2006!

Anton is a doctor in Berlin, watching with concern as his mother battles against advancing dementia in smalltown Lower Saxony.
Every year she sends him and his Berlin friends Alix and Bernd a batch of strawberry jam. The strawberries grow on the ‘field’, as she calls the garden she has lovingly tended her whole life long. But this year she forgets to plant out the runners…
Anton has to see that his mother is losing herself bit by bit, each of her defeats taking a piece of his own existence with it: the familiar land of childhood.
After years on his own, he meets Lydia and finds a future in which love seems genuinely possible. But Lydia has a past that breaks into both their lives with a vengeance.
In this novel of many voices, Katharina Hacker creates a sensitive portrait of people who have to look back to move forward and plan the second half of their lives.

Who has written so movingly about losing one world and gaining another?

Rights sold:
France: Christian Bourgois