Easter Storm

Angry, implacable, full of sarcasm: in her novel debut, Easter Storm, Saskia Fischer hurls bolts of lightning and sets fire to a family idyll that is actually more like hell.

A picture book Easter celebration: the weather glorious and the whole family gathered around the Easter Sunday lunch table. Then Aleit, bluish and foaming at the mouth, keels over onto her stepfather’s shoulder – an epileptic fit. She’s not an epileptic, but there is a reason for the fit. The doctors shrug their shoulders but Aleit starts digging deeper. What she finds is not conducive to her recovery: her own husband hides behind a cloud of weed, her sister behind her veil of innocence; her mother is buried in her children’s GDR-era first reading books, and her stepfather disappears with Aleit’s five-year-old daughter into his darkened room. Another bolt of lightning surges through Aleit’s brain, and thus illuminated she sees her chance to confront her family’s disavowal strategies once and for all.

»Saskia Fischer […] has written an impressive debut. An emotional landscape, a German landscape: less a psychological profile than an exploded view drawing.« FAZ

»What makes this novel so exciting is the intensity of the language. The lyric poet Saskia Fischer is present in each and every sentence. [...] It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen such a radical book about the ›meltdown of the nuclear family‹ in this age that is usually more interested in feel-good themes and a petty bourgeois return to traditional values.« Saarländischer Rundfunk

»Angry, clever and, despite many poignant and disturbing scenes, so quietly and unpreten-tiously written that you actually start to worry that, in contrast to so many over-hyped post-reunification novels, this impressive debut might actually go unnoticed.« Westdeutscher Rundfunk