Die Amazone fhrt Fahrrad

Between Moscow and Berlin, between the Baltic and the Balkans, between war and peace, this novel unfolds. A woman named Alina takes us on journeys through both cheerful and threatening phases of her life. The family flees from her birthplace, Riga, to Berlin in escape from the Russians. When Berlin is bombed, the journey continues to Poland. Years later, she recounts her Russian-Latvian family history to her husband in a hospital. She shares stories of her bourgeois “Mammush” and her aunt’s experiences in a Siberian camp. After undergoing a mastectomy, Alina, the “Amazon,” questions her previous life as the wife of a publisher. She escapes with a Bosnian friend to Croatia, discovering the Balkans with its magnificent landscapes. Even there, the war has left devastation and shattered families. Alina forges friendships, listens to stories, writes them down, and takes photographs. Does she find what she’s looking for there, and will she return to Paul, who still loves her? Readers need not search for world history in this novel; its characters and their fates are right in the middle of it. In a confusing life, constantly on the move, in flight, breathless. Marina Schnurre reflects the age of extremes in her storytelling.