Queen July

A record-hot summer in Paris. A bathtub full of cold water, inside: July, sipping white wine. She asks questions, listens, and comments at the right moments. Where better to share Aziza's story than with her? Sitting on the tiled floor next to the tub at night, Aziza tells July, a woman she barely knows, about her upbringing in Paris and her life in Djibouti. For years, she has been trying to forget her Parisian life and loves there. This isn't too difficult for her, given her job as an anesthetist in a Chinese hospital, dry gin martinis with an attractive colleague from Addis Ababa, the wrecked hotel suite after nights with Somali khat smugglers, and yacht tours with a playboy from Mozambique. Until the moment Strehler reaches out again. Strehler, whom Aziza knows from her school days in Paris, her first real relationship. Strehler, who inexplicably kept distancing himself from her, suddenly and unexpectedly turned away from her back then. The mysterious gaps in this romance have turned Strehler into a phantom that spoils Aziza's ease at the Horn of Africa. And so, Aziza finds herself once again entangled in daydreams between worlds, which only July in her bathtub can untangle. The novel "Queen July" is like a French film - told with great ease yet surprisingly reflective.