And Everything is Like Paper Mâché

It is the late summer of 2001 in the backwoods of Baden. On the television, there are images of the World Trade Centre collapsing. Jian is sixteen and in love with Sarah, but sleeps with Anna who has just broken up with Frank. After that, Sarah doesn’t want to have anything to do with Jian anymore, nor Jian with Anna, and Frank is caught up in his own self. Fifteen years later Anna is in a love-triangle, Frank is hidden away in the forest, and Jian comes across Sarah again in paparazzi photos. They have long since lost track of one another and yet Jian continues to narrate how their shared story might run.

Yannic Han Biao Federer’s first novel follows four young people as they try to find their place and direction in an ever more disparate and fragile world. He reveals how close history and experience are intertwined and explores the time we are living in with great alertness and intelligence.

»[An] impressively consistent debut novel.« Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Yannic Han Biao Federer. A name to remember. That’s what young German literature should be.« Johannes Puch, ORF

»In nine dense episodes Federer creates the need for belonging, very confident in his language and dramatic composition. Each time the narration opens a new space in which similar structures and questions appear but it also holds together the common imaginary story. – A read with its very own kind of tension.« Bettina Hesse, WDR

»The beauty of this novel is that the author often needs but a few lines to put a whole scene to paper.« GuH, Luxemburger Tagblatt

»The author manages to give life to his characters with the skillful construction of his novel as well as his narration that oscillates continuously between melancholy and humour.« Sascha Seiler, literaturkritik.de

»Federer connects all the stories […] to form the novel of a whole generation.« Bücheratlas

»An exciting kaleidoscope of memory.« Westdeutsche Zeitung

»[...] With his debut novel And Everything is Like Paper Mâché, Yannic Han Biao Federer presents a breath-taking journey through time that makes the fleeing heart of a generation, of an era as well as of people in general come to live in the infectious narrative verve.« Walter Pobaschnig, literaturoutdoors.com