Halbinsel

Bestseller. Awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2025. A house by the Wadden Sea. A mother and her daughter. And the attempt to bridge the gap between generations. A peninsula in the North Frisian Wadden Sea. Here, by the North Sea, lives Annett, in her late forties, for many years. Here she has raised her daughter Linn alone after the early death of her husband. Linn, in her mid-twenties, has ventured into the world full of energy after finishing high school, engaged as an environmental volunteer in Swedish and Romanian forests, and is working on a reforestation project. For Annett, her daughter embodies hope, meaning, and the future. However, during a conference, while giving a presentation, Linn collapses, suffering from a circulatory failure and exhaustion. Annett brings her home for a week, to the sea, near Husum. What starts as one week turns into two, then three weeks, and eventually months. Caught between performance pressure and the search for meaning, Linn seems to reach a standstill in her mid-twenties. Annett feels helpless in the face of her daughter's lack of motivation. Over time, conflicts arise between mother and daughter, but also between two generations. One must learn to understand the reality of life of the other anew. With great sensitivity to interpersonal dynamics, Kristine Bilkau explores the pressing questions of our time - the question of the older generation's responsibility for the state of the world, as well as the younger generation's desire to fill their own lives with meaning.