The Last Patient

She sat at the kitchen table, smoking, exuding a »seductive world-weariness reminiscent of the films of the Nouvelle Vague«. Having been left by a man, she turns up in the narrator’s share house in Frankfurt in 1973 looking for a room. She was majoring in history and French. Three years later, after falling in love with a Spanish anarchist, she follows him to Barcelona.

After a few more abortive relationships, she leaves Europe for the Americas, with stints in Arizona, Mexico City, Guatemala, Buenos Aires, but after years of a peripatetic life and countless »desperate attempts at love«, she finally finds her way back to Barcelona, where she trains to become a psychotherapist, specialising in trauma.

One day, a young woman arrives at her practice who doesn’t speak. Years go by before the first words escape her lips. Has she been the victim of some horrible crime? Or is the darkness that leaves her mute the product of psychosis? What’s clear is that this patient will give her therapist – now gravely ill with cancer – the love she couldn’t find anywhere else in the world.

Ulrike Edschmid tells this moving, disturbing, and ultimately consoling story as is customary for her work: concise and sparse, delivering a dense book that retains a remarkable deftness of touch.

»The undisputed master of reduction.« Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»No one else writes sentences like Edschmid. … The enormous brilliance [of this novel] lies in its extreme economy.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»It is difficult to escape the pull of the books of Ulrike Edschmid.« Fokke Joel, neues deutschland

»Ulrike Edschmid’s The Last Patient cleverly and artfully recounts the fates of wounded women.« Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Edschmid transforms a series of fates into artfully compressed narrative texts with a meaning that extends far beyond the individual stories and their historical contexts.« Oliver Pfohlmann, Der Tagesspiegel

»To my mind, Ulrike Edschmid is one of the most important contemporary writers working in German; because other than perhaps Annie Ernaux, nobody is able to weave together the individual biographies of these mostly female protagonists with social conditions in such a linguistically convincing fashion. Her most recent book, The Last Patient, is a prime example of this.« Isabelle Graw, Texte zur Kunst

»Ulrike Edschmid uses this short form in the most elegant way to capture one woman’s singular, existential search for meaning.« Mara Delius, WELT AM SONNTAG

»Edschmid’s books are … not just documents of recent history, but also an expression of a way of relating to the world in which political and other passions function as the leitmotif.« Katharina Teutsch, DIE ZEIT