In her new book, Sybille Berg brings together fairytale and coming-of-age novel, satire and romance. From the alternating perspectives of the two protagonists, she describes the nightmare of adolescence and all that it entails: the feeling of isolation, first love, jealousy. Warm-heartedly and comically, tenderly and grotesquely, she describes an escape from the twofold repression of parents and state. A modern fairytale for grown-ups, precisely accurate and unexpectedly enlightening as only a genuine Berg novel can be. Charmingly illustrated by Rita Ackermann and Andro Wekua.
Anna and Max, both almost 14 years, are neighbours. They live in an apartment block in East Germany but only get to know each other one day when Anna’s mother collapses in the street in a state of drunkenness again and Max comes to the rescue. While Anna’s mother sleeps herself sober, the two children decide to run away together. They run away from their childhood, from East Germany, from their parents, who do not speak to them, in search of a life they can determine themselves. They hitchhike through the Eastern bloc to the Black Sea, narrowly escape traffickers of children, end up in the clutches of a married couple who sell children to a factory owner in Poland, get a taste of happiness in Budapest and are forced to beg in Romania, narrowly escaping the police. In Constanta, they board a cargo ship bound for Turkey as stowaways. Anna and Max leave behind a home that was never really a home and, hand in hand, embark on a new life as they discover a completely new feeling, the first signs of tender love for each other.
