Summer at the Old Mill

• A warm and relatable novel about a successful business woman who has to go back to help out on the farm she grew up on
• For readers of Dörte Hansen, Mariana Leky and Katharina Hagena
• English sample translation by Anne Stokes available

In Summer at the Old Mill, Martina Bogdahn tells the story of a single mother and her life between two worlds. Of a youth in the country and an escape to the city. And of mothers and daughters and family ties that bind as well as connect. 

Maria runs an advertising agency in the city and is the single mother of two teenage daughters. She's on her way to a weekend in the mountains with friends and family when she gets a call from her mother: her father had an accident and is in the hospital. It is not sure if he'll survive. Maria has to go and help her mother with the farm as she cannot manage it alone. Fortunately, you don't forget how to muck out a barn and look after the pigs when you did it every day as a child.

As soon as Maria gets back, memories overwhelm her, and she thinks back on the happy times she spent here with her brother, when they were still best friends. Now, they have been estranged for fifteen years, following a dispute about who should inherit the farm. The question of what will happen to the farm once their parents are gone, comes to a head as their father's life hangs in the balance. 

As if in passing, the novel asks the big questions: How do we want to live and where? What do we call home and why? How do our origins shape us? What makes  us happy and whole?