Das Geburtstagsfest

A birthday celebration, an unwanted guest, and an unavoidable catastrophe. For his 50th birthday, Kim Mey's three children want to surprise their father with a special guest at the family birthday party: Without his knowledge, they have invited Tevi Gardiner, the woman with whom Kim fled Cambodia as a child and whom he hasn't seen in 25 years. However, instead of reacting with joy as expected, Kim responds strangely cold. Ines, the mother of the three, also meets Tevi with a frosty demeanor. What Kim and Ines have kept silent about for decades is now making itself heard relentlessly: the true circumstances of that dramatic escape from Cambodia and the terrible end of a great love. Thus, a seemingly harmless surprise turns a birthday celebration into a family drama.

"The Birthday Celebration," the painfully empathetic family drama by the renowned Spiegel bestseller author and Glauser Prize winner Judith W. Taschler, revolves around family relationships and life lies, great love, and themes of escape and return. Told in a multi-voiced and virtuosic manner, Judith W. Taschler from Innsbruck creates characters in her unmistakably clear language that resonate deeply with the reader and remain memorable for a long time. Judith W. Taschler illuminates the significant turning points in life, narrating with finesse and psychological depth, full of compassion for her characters, without ever becoming sentimental.