A moving coming-of-age novel about mental health and true friendship
Selected for New Books in German – translation funding guaranteed for the English language
The last years at school, first time with a girl, first time with a boy, and a diagnosis that makes everything more complicated. Stephan Lohse writes about mental health with striking empathy, and depicts what it’s like to be a teenager with wit and poetry. And he shows how much easier it all is when you have friends as good as Matti’s.
Persons
Stephan Lohse
Stephan Lohse was born in Hamburg in 1964 and studied drama at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and was employed at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Schaubühne in Berlin and at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna. His novel Ein fauler Gott (2017) was on the SWR Bestseller List and nominated for the aspekte Prize for Literature. He has since published the novels Johanns Bruder (2020) and Das Summen unter der Haut (2023), which was an NDR book of the month and was also on the Deutschlandfunk-Bestenliste. He lives in Berlin
Stephan Lohse was born in Hamburg in 1964 and studied drama at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and was employed at the Thalia Theater in...
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
The Humming Underneath the Skin
»Axel has been missing for three days. I subtract the hours that have passed without him here from the eighty hours that I have known him. Twenty-six hours are left. In little more...
Film rights optioned
Johann’s Brother
Paul is arrested by police in a village in Northern Germany. He has beheaded seventeen chickens. Because he refuses to talk about the incident, he is taken to a psychiatric hospital, from where his younger brother Johann is supposed to pick him up – the two men haven’t seen each other in over twenty years. When Paul eventually asks his brother to accompany him on a trip, Johann...
A Lazy God
Autumn, 1972. 8-year-old Jonas dies. His mother Ruth and his brother Benjamin try to carry on, each in their own way. Ruth decides to investigate Jonas’s death. She questions the lifeguard and his apprentice in the swimming pool where he died; in the hospital, she has them explain his death to her. She reads books, searching for a hidden meaning in all of this, and feeds an abandoned...