What else I missed

It is considered the best-kept secret of American literature. Lucia Berlin is the rediscovery of the year and is compared with Raymond Carver, Richard Yates or Grace Paley. Her stories bear witness to an unsettled life full of breaks. It is women like her whose fate holds her in its grip: single mothers, alcoholics in rehab, domestic helpers, nurses and secretaries. It is about mothers and daughters, broken marriages and pregnant girls, immigrants, wealth and poverty, loneliness, love and violence. The places of action are laundrettes, cafés and restaurants, hospitals and doctors' surgeries. This is where the unexpected happens, where the small miracles of life are revealed, tragedies develop, which Lucia Berlin sometimes gets to the bottom of with fine humour, sometimes full of melancholy, but always with touching empathy.