Walzer für Niemand

A coming-of-age story infused with the magic and power of music – and the tale of a friendship whose intimacy is destructive. Exceptional musician Sophie Hunger gifts us with a profound and poetic, tragicomic and nuanced novel that explores what we must lose to become something. A girl and her best friend Nobody. As children of military attachés, their upbringing is marked by constant relocations. Carried by the rhythm of music, they experience the magic and upheavals of childhood and adolescence. They are happiest when they lose themselves in their record collection, when they re-map the world in their atlas according to band names, when they shout decibel levels in piano lessons, or when they find in songs the phrases that have always lurked within them. They hide in the music and are hidden by it, but they always have each other. Yet, cracks begin to form in their friendship. While Nobody develops an obsession with the folklore of the Walser women, from whom the narrator descends, and while she herself begins to write her own songs, a catastrophe looms. Sophie Hunger impressively transforms her unique qualities as a songwriter into a multifaceted and moving novel about becoming, friendship, and the elemental nature of music.