Filiz grows up in a Kurdish village in Turkey. She is twelve when she falls in love with Yunus, only a couple of years older than her, and they start to dream of a life together in the West: »›How do we want to live, Yunus?‹ / ›In jeans. We’ll be wearing blue jeans. In Germany.‹«

When she is fifteen, she marries Yunus – in secret, and against her father’s wishes. But the wedding bursts the bubble of their dreams of freedom and autonomy: instead of blue jeans, Filiz is now wearing a veil; together with the three children that were born into this marriage, she is subjected to physical and mental abuse by her husband and her mother-in-law. And the family’s emigration to the West doesn’t change anything about that – at first. Because after the violence escalates one last time, Filiz manages the seemingly impossible: to escape from physical and psychological dependency.

Katharina Winkler‘s debut novel Blue Jewellery is based entirely on true events. It describes the abysses of dependence and brutal subjugation vividly and depicts a woman’s life, in which love and violence aren’t merely inseparable, but have become indistinguishable.