Daughters

Lucy Fricke's 'Daughters' tells the story of two women either side of forty on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way. A bestseller and booksellers' favourite in Germany, 'Daughters' evokes laughter and tears by way of life and death, friendship and family.

Lucy Frickes 'Töchter' erzählt die Geschichte von zwei Frauen um die vierzig, die sich auf einem Roadtrip durch Europa mit ihren jeweils ganz unterschiedlichschwierigen Vätern auseinandersetzen. 'Töchter' bringt uns zum Lachen und zum Weinen - über das Leben und den Tod, über Freundschaft und Familie. Im deutschsprachigen Raum avancierte der Roman zum Buchhandelsliebling und Bestseller.

Lucy Fricke wurd 1974 in Hamburg geboren, hat am Deutschen Literaturinstitut Leipzig studiert, lange Jahre beim Film gearbeitet und in den letzten zehn Jahren vier Romane veröffentlicht. Für ihre Arbeiten wurde sie mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Ihr Buch 'Töchter' erhielt den Bayerischen Buchpreis 2018. Seit 2010 veranstaltet Lucy Fricke HAM.LIT, das erste Hamburger Festival für junge Literatur und Musik. Sie lebt in Berlin.

Lucy Fricke's 'Daughters' tells the story of two women either side of forty on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way. A bestseller and booksellers' favourite in Germany, 'Daughters' evokes laughter and tears by way of life and death, friendship and family.

Lucy Frickes 'Töchter' erzählt die Geschichte von zwei Frauen um die vierzig, die sich auf einem Roadtrip durch Europa mit ihren jeweils ganz unterschiedlichschwierigen Vätern auseinandersetzen. 'Töchter' bringt uns zum Lachen und zum Weinen - über das Leben und den Tod, über Freundschaft und Familie. Im deutschsprachigen Raum avancierte der Roman zum Buchhandelsliebling und Bestseller.

Lucy Fricke wurd 1974 in Hamburg geboren, hat am Deutschen Literaturinstitut Leipzig studiert, lange Jahre beim Film gearbeitet und in den letzten zehn Jahren vier Romane veröffentlicht. Für ihre Arbeiten wurde sie mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Ihr Buch 'Töchter' erhielt den Bayerischen Buchpreis 2018. Seit 2010 veranstaltet Lucy Fricke HAM.LIT, das erste Hamburger Festival für junge Literatur und Musik. Sie lebt in Berlin.

Auteur

Lucy Fricke wurd 1974 in Hamburg geboren, hat am Deutschen Literaturinstitut Leipzig studiert, lange Jahre beim Film gearbeitet und in den letzten zehn Jahren vier Romane veröffentlicht. Für ihre Arbeiten wurde sie mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Ihr Buch "Töchter" erhielt den Bayerischen Buchpreis 2018. Seit 2010 veranstaltet Lucy Fricke HAM.LIT, das erste Hamburger Festival für junge Literatur und Musik. Sie lebt in Berlin.

Résumé
Lucy Fricke's "Daughters" tells the story of two women either side of forty on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way. A bestseller and booksellers' favourite in Germany, "Daughters" evokes laughter and tears by way of life and death, friendship and family. Lucy Frickes Töchter erzählt die Geschichte von zwei Frauen um die vierzig, die sich auf einem Roadtrip durch Europa mit ihren jeweils ganz unterschiedlichschwierigen Vätern auseinandersetzen. Töchter bringt uns zum Lachen und zum Weinen über das Leben und den Tod, über Freundschaft und Familie. Im deutschsprachigen Raum avancierte der Roman zum Buchhandelsliebling und Bestseller.

Échantillon de lecture
All Sorted

I'd taken the first flight out, the night so short as to be practically non-existent, and now, at around half past nine on a Monday morning, I was dragging my suitcase across Warschauer Bridge, where the party had just broken up, the revellers either in bed, passed out in a pool of vomit or still dancing in some club. I trudged past empty bottles of cheap sparkling wine, shattered beer bottles and an abandoned amp. Shards crunched beneath the wheels of my case. Around the next corner, right beside a massive building site, was my flat. The stairwell smelled like an exploded beer cellar, and a numb silence had taken hold. The building had adapted to its bacchanalian surroundings. To survive the noise here, you needed a country retreat or a job abroad. To afford the rent, you had to sublet your rooms to people from duller countries, people who came here to behave in ways they would never dream of at home. We lived in a muddle, sleeping on sofas with the downstairs and upstairs neighbours, while in our own flats, party tourists pissed on the parquet floors.

I financed myself by fleeing the city. Whenever I was strapped for cash, I would head to parts of the world that were cheaper than this one, of which there were many. 'Kill the investor in you,' I'd read on the side of a building in Kreuzberg recently and cheerfully disregarded. I felt that I'd been living in this neighbourhood long enough now to deserve a piece of the pie, that in fact I myself was the pie. So, like nearly everyone else, I flogged my own home for 80 euros a night.

And then on Thursdays we'd clutch our cardboard coffee cups at demos to save the Turkish greengrocer's, if not the entire neighbourhood, from being driven out, standing alongside artists from Charlottenburg and Prenzlauer Berg who'd shown up to express their solidarity and day-trippers carrying canvas bags emblazoned with protest slogans. A few speeches, a few songs about the rising rents and the selling-out, and demand on Airbnb would shoot up another twenty per cent. The tourists bought the bags and later toted them around New York, Barcelona and Lower Bavaria. No one ever bought vegetables.

The face in my mirror looked exactly as old as it was: just over forty. The lines stayed white in the sun now, as if I'd shattered on the inside. I could only call myself beautiful in the past tense. Age had arrived by night, and it kept on coming. I used to grow while I dreamt, but soon I would start shrinking in my sleep, waking up smaller each morning until I vanished entirely. Sometimes I wondered how I was going to get through all the time until then. And to top it all off, there was more hair sprouting on my face each day.

The Spanish kid had thrown up next to my toilet, the stereo had been set to the highest volume. A jar of peanut butter, a chunk of Emmental and a bottle of beer in the fridge, three cigarette butts stamped out on the floor. José, 24, lives in Madrid . The picture in my bedroom was now hanging upside down. Apparently José was a practical joker. I was glad I'd never met him.

It took me two hours to clean the flat, to purge it, to scrape Spanish youth out of the cracks. When I was done, I opened José's beer, sat down by the window and looked out at the Spree. It was mid-April and the river was still a river rather than a party strip. In less than six weeks, the techno cruisers would be blaring past, their lasers groping the walls of my study. I'd be looking out at frenzied stag and hen parties, at semi-clad men and even less-clad women, all of whom would be thinking they were having the time of their lives and would probably be right, a state of affairs I found increasingly pitiful.

There was no sign of Martha when I arrived at the bar. There was no sign of anyone, apart from a barman I'd never s