In a small town in the south of Germany, young Seri experiences the bright days of childhood: days that she spends in her friend Aja’s garden, a girl from a family of Hungarian artistes who lives with her mother in a block on the edge of town.
Yet even the apparently intact world of her 1960s childhood has an invisible crack: Seri’s father died shortly after her birth, and Aja’s father, a circus trapeze artist, only comes to visit once a year. The girls’ friend Karl has lost his younger brother, who got into a stranger’s car one bright blue spring day and never came back.
It is the mothers who steer Karl and the girls through the currents and shallows of their childhoods, teaching them not to be scared of life and always to live it to the full.
Zsuzsa Bánk tells the story of three families, accompanying her young heroes through half their lives. When Seri, Karl and Aja go to university in Rome, the city becomes a turning point in their biographies – and a tough test for a friendship between love and betrayal, guilt and forgiveness.
