Another sharp, witty and warmhearted family saga by the bestselling author
When Uncle Willi dies, Lorenz, in the throes of a “one-third-life crisis,” and his three aunts face a challenge: Willi always wanted to be buried in his native Montenegro. But since they don’t have enough money to transport the corpse officially, they set off in a Fiat Panda from Vienna to the Balkans, with the corpse just another (illegal) passenger.
In the course of the 1,029-kilometer trip, the adventure-filled stories of the members of the Prischinger family artfully come together. Mirl, the oldest sister, was forced to take on responsibility early on after the war, when all she wanted was to get away from her parents’ inn, away from the countryside. But neither the city nor her marriage turn out as she hoped they would. As for Wetti, already as a child, she was more interested in animals than in people. As a cleaning lady in the Museum of Natural History, she soon gets to know the specimens better than any curator, and as the single mother of a dark-skinned daughter, she shocks Viennese society. And Hedi, the youngest of the bunch, gets to know Willi at a point in her life when she is just about done with it. For, the three sisters experienced a major loss in their early years. And each of them blames herself for it.
