Misophonia

A summer travelling between Berlin, Chicago and Jerusalem. Like every year, fifteen-year-old Margarita spends her school holidays with her grandparents in the USA. But she would much rather go back to Germany, to her friends and her father, who leads prayers in the synagogue. Her mother left them when Margarita was still in kindergarten. High time, the family council decides, that they get to know each other better. And so Margarita is put on a plane to Israel, where her father grew up and her mother has recently moved to. Immediately upon her arrival, everything starts to go wrong, the journey of mother and daughter through the Holy Land tears open old and inflicts new wounds, conflicts escalate, while Margarita’s father in Berlin rethinks the role he plays and the decisions he has made in a life that seems to have fast tracked him. And then it’s already time to pack their bags yet again and return to Chicago, where everyone gathers around the grandmother's sickbed and Margarita has to make a momentous decision.

Misophonia is a story about the confusing fate of having a family whose members are drawn in opposite directions, about adolescent responsibility and adult irresponsibility, about how hysterically funny it is to be alive, how devastatingly complicated. It’s a novel about being homesick and confused, about having to live inside a teenage body. A novel about faith in God and good food, about Jewish life across continents, about parental roles defying societal expectations, about being multilingual and still not being able to find the right words.

»Dana Vowinckel's wonderful novel carried me along like a riptide. It introduced me to dimensions I know little about: the wild emotions of a fifteen-year-old and the inner dialogue of an observant Jew. The book is rich in contrasting ingredients: the tensions between parents and children or the absurd calculus of the pious and the secular living together. Vowinckel's debut rises above a merely anecdotal novel to the heights of the best of literature.« Eric Bogosian

»[With Misophonia, Vowinckel] has made German-language contemporary literature a more beautiful place, and I'm so grateful for her book and her immense talent.« Christian Kracht, author of the International Booker–longlisted Eurotrash

»Reading Dana Vowinckel means: to suffer, to laugh, to learn, all at the same time. May she please keep on telling stories. I would like to read a hundred more of her books.« Daniela Dröscher

»Dana Vowinckel’s literary debut is an insightful teenage and Jewish family drama played out in a world that no longer exists … The portrait of Margarita’s father, in particular, and his quiet reflections on longing and being an outsider, gives the novel a tenderness and presence that really hits home.« Vårt Land (Norway)

»Dana Vowinckel’s novel is of profound wisdom, it knows about faltering, about the yearning and the turmoil of travelling the world. Without the Tower of Babel and the Babylonian exile, this work about our human language would be inconceivable.« Julia Franck, winner of the German Book Prize, 2007

»May this relentlessly intelligent and confident debut find many readers.« Tim Caspar Boehme, taz. die tageszeitung

»A deeply moving, captivating debut ...« Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»A debut that is going to occupy our minds for many years to come.« Michèle Loetzner, VOGUE

»Dana Vowinckel’s senstive coming-of-age novel reveals—without kitsch—the yearning to belong, while also addressing the fear of doing so. An enthralling debut.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»People in Germany like to complain that English-language literature tackles heavy themes in a much more uncomplicated way, that it’s at once easy to read and yet still full of depth. Well, this debut from Dana Vowinckel ticks all these boxes.« Meike Schnitzler, Brigitte

»Even before the book was even published, [Dana Vowinckel] had already bagged plenty of praise for the diversity of perspectives in her debut novel Misophonia, for the narrative density of its depiction of Jewish life in Berlin, Chicago, and Jerusalem, and for its strong characters and sensual style. … Now, reading the full text, we can say that it was justly deserved.« Gunda Bartels, Der Tagesspiegel

»… in the diffuse in-between of a translatlantic summer, global history becomes liquid and congeals into personal memories that can fit in a ziplock bag. Anybody who wants to read a contemporary literary depiction of the third generation of Jewish life after the Schoah should read this book.« Caspar Battegay, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»The novel portrays its characters as damaged, recalcitrant, and enchanting figures: embroiled in heartbreaking fights, sometimes consoled by intimacy or religious rituals, moved or crippled by loneliness, misunderstandings, helplessness, and then pulsing with yearning and brimming with hope.« Beate Tröger, Deutschlandfunk

»… this young author writes well and has … a lot to say.« Sabine Rohlf, Berliner Zeitung

»Misophonia is a departure, also into a new phase of Shoah memory culture between ›Flying home‹ and ›Leaving home‹.« Jan Drees, Deutschlandfunk