I was a Servant in the Hobbs Household

Shortlisted for the Wilhelm Raabe Literay Prize 2018
Recommended for translation by New Books in German
English sample translation available

A scandal and an unexpected death shake up Zurich society’s best circles

It was Christian, a young servant to the lawyer Hobbs’s family, who discovered the corpse next to the blood-spattered chaise longue in the garden pavilion. Years later he looks back and tries to understand how this catastrophe was able to come to pass. Yet his memory is unreliable – so nothing is as it initially seems in this thornily sinister and beguilingly light-footed novel.

Seemingly at random, memories of his youth in the small Austrian city of Feldkirch edge their way into his reconstruction of the past: Four eccentrically provincial youths dressed in fabulous suits sit by the summer lake reciting Zweig and Hesse, harboring their very own theory about curly-haired women and that wonderful feeling that all of this is just the beginning. Christian tells of how the sworn friends drifted apart, of his early days as a servant in Zurich, when the Hobbs family’s idyll of abundance still seemed intact, of confusing nightly room visits and of the fatal moment when the captivating lady of the house runs into Christian’s old friends and suddenly everything is hanging by a thread. In the course of plumbing the depths of his guilt, he stumbles upon a big secret.

Verena Roßbacher’s third novel is brimming with psychological brilliance and spot-on humor.