Friends, I have the perfect Christmas Day book for you. It’s beautiful, touching, human, and it’s about things that really matter.
The novel has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, and French. It received the Dublin Literary Award for 2023. And it shows that people are desperate for good books about normal lives of normal people.
The novel’s narrator is a failed writer who trains as a chiropodist at the age of 45 and starts working at a small salon in Marzahn, a Soviet-era residential area in the former GDR. Her clients are mostly elderly people, and she listens to their stories – funny, tragic, uplifting, or silly – realizing what a gift it is to come in touch with these amazing old people.
What starts as Katja’s midlife crisis, turns into a life rich with tenderness and humanity.
Can you remember your midlife crisis – the fuzzy years, when you were turning around, at a loss, flagging from the tedium of swimming? Can you remember the fear of sinking in the middle of the big lake without a sound and without a cause – when you could see no land anywhere, no coastline, no shore, when you dropped to the bottom?
Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp
The novel is autobiographical, and it’s written with such simplicity and unpretentiousness that it really gets to you. It transmits an incredible sense of peacefulness and comfort. I’ll never be able to achieve even a tenth of the inner peace that Katja feels normally but at least I can read about it.
I can’t imagine anything better to read on Christmas than this beautiful novel. Grab some hot chocolate, curl up under something exceptionally fuzzy, and lose yourself in Marzahn.
Clarissa's Blog 
I loved this novel too! Amazing that it has been translated and found its way to you. 🙂
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I read that this was a first-time translator who translated the novel as a way of getting started in the field. And then bam! A huge success.
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