Die Fragmentsammlerin

Désirée Scheidegger presents her debut novel, "The Fragment Collector." In it, the Bernese author writes about the search for identity and encounters with new worlds. With her first work, "Aaregeflüster," she was nominated for the Kurt Marti Prize in 2017. A young woman flees before her blind date at the art museum. A choir singer awkwardly stands on stage with his plastic gun. A rebellious green teenage bottle becomes quite tame due to a new task. The transport of a strange white ball leads to the downfall of two spiders. A boy is disappointed when he encounters a lion. "The Fragment Collector" captures stories of children in an asylum center while intertwining dreams, reality, and the surreal in her own life. Despite the often quirky protagonists in the narrative threads, they share a commonality. The novel presents glimpses of a life. Of many lives. It is about arriving in a foreign world and arriving within oneself. It is about the moment when everything begins anew yet continues to flow.