The Sound of Light

English sample translation by Jamie Bulloch available
Recommended for translation by New Books in German

Katharina Hagena’s new novel carries us off to the aurora borealis in the Northwest Territories and to the oil towns of Alberta. It tells of people who have lost something – love, a friend, a mother or themselves.

It starts with five people in a waiting room. Who could they be? One observes the others and invents their life stories. There’s the botanist Daphne Holt, as resilient and delicate as the moss she studies. In search of a friend, she stumbles upon a secret in the Canadian wilderness. There’s the musician in his yolk-yellow houseboat, fulfilling his wife’s last wishes, waiting for the northern lights on a frozen lake. In every opening, every shaft, behind every grate, 12-year-old Richard sees a possible passageway to the planet Tschu – because that’s where his mother and sister are, since they have to be somewhere if they’re not here anymore. And then there’s the confused lady, throughout whose mind the white emptiness has already spread considerably. Finally, the narrator invents her own story, a thriller about the crimes of a ruthless oil company, in which her own life comes into danger.

A moving, gripping novel about the redemptive power of imagination