Love in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien

With the five main characters searching for love and popping up in each other’s stories, it might all sound like a poor German spin-off of Sex and the City, but that’s definitely not the case. Each piece, running for forty to fifty pages, focuses on a woman in her forties, usually seeing them at a turning point in their life, and Krien builds the story through setting the woman’s current issues against scenes from her past. Luckily, then, we’re not constrained to one character – we’re off to Germany to catch up with five women looking for love, and a lot more besides 🙂ĭaniela Krien’s Love in Five Acts (translated by Jamie Bulloch, review copy courtesy of MacLehose Press) is a set of five interconnected long stories set in the German city of Leipzig, part of the old East Germany before the wall fell. We’ll be examining what it means to be a woman in the modern world, and as you can imagine, that means there’s a lot to discuss. At the heart of the novel are five very different women who find themselves hurtling towards a new way of living without knowing quite how they got there.Ī fresh take on women's lives, Love in Case of Emergency is a punchy yet sensitive novel that takes the notion of aspiring to find happiness and connection to new and exhilarating heights.While the first of this week’s non-Booker posts featured a man in a bygone era, today’s takes us in a very different direction. Krien explores the hopes, ambitions, challenges, and disappointments that shape modern women's lives, offering intimate insights on motherhood and childlessness, bereavement, infidelity, and divorce.

What happens when women fulfill their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters, and daughters? What comes next? Award-winning author Daniela Krien explores these questions in this powerful novel of friendship, love, loss, and everything in between. Writing with the wry realism of Sally Rooney, one of Germany' most promising literary talents demonstrates her incisive understanding of the complexities of relationships and the depths of the human heart in this witty and compulsively readable novel about five very different women whose lives intersect.

'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

Love in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien