Love in Five Acts

By: Daniela Krien

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Paperback | 28 April 2022 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
1.6 x 13.1 x 19.8

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Five women attempt the impossible - to love, to be strong, and to stay true to themselves - for readers of Conversations with Friends and An American Marriage

Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone?

Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice.

Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

About the Author

Daniela Krien was born in 1975 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, then in the G.D.R. Her first novel, Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything, was published in English in 2013 (MacLehose Press) and in fourteen other languages. For a subsequent volume of short stories, Muldental, she was awarded the Nicolaus Born Prize. Love in Five Acts has been sold for translation into twenty languages. She lives in Leipzig with her two daughters.

Industry Reviews

Love in Five Acts is written - and translated - sparsely, five disparate voices cramming a world of nuance into a rare and elegant conciseness. - New European

Written in unsentimental, affecting prose, this is an intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty. - Observer

This exquisite portrait of five middle-class women's lives is utterly captivating . . . A beautifully written masterclass in human frailty. - Woman and Home

Krien excels in the detail on which a life turns and she uses understated humour to great effect...Krien is unfailingly impressive in her depiction of the lives of these five very different women. - Irish Times

A multifaceted examination of female longing and loss . . . A sympathetic and clear-eyed view of modern womanhood. - Financial Times Summer Books of 2021

Krien's writing (translated, excellently, by Jamie Bulloch) is sparse and precise. It hops about in time, but chronological confusion fades in teh face of the self-contained intensity of the chapters. - Telegraph

The writing is spare but meticulous, cutting to the heart of the matter in each of the five intimate novellas. Occasionally mordantly funny, it is all gloriously Germanic . . . All these women are children of Unification and the GDR casts a long shadow. Highly recommended. - Sunday Times

Fans of Sarah Dunn, Elisabeth Egan, and Isabel Gillies will relate to the multifaceted lives of Krien's characters, brilliantly rendered in her vivid voice. - Booklist

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