The Town

A dense, atmospheric novel about a boy’s first love, his first consciousness, his first attempt to define himself as a person. A moving memoir of the age between childhood and adulthood.

The beginning of love is the beginning of power. Some of us are in, the rest are out. Even when they’re still playing children’s games like French elastics, they already know how beautiful they are. So says the narrator, who, as an adult, thinks back to his puberty, imagining himself as another, romantic doppelganger. He imagines walking along a route which he used to walk often, decades ago, before the houses and the streets of his childhood fell victim to renovation and modernisation. And when the girls used to play French elastics. He remembers his first love Katja Melchior, and the first night they spent together.

»The atmospheric density and the observational sharpness with which Andreas Maier […] portrays the birth of dissimulation from the spirit of puberty is a feat of great narrative art. […] A gem of a story […].« FAZ

»This short novel may seem cold in its sentence structure and word choice. But its power resides in precisely these sentences. Anyone who does not know the first three instalments in the series will want to read them, and in the meantime we anxiously await the next volume.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag

»The mixture of self-reflection, megalomania and a bone-dry sense of humour turns out to be perfect.« Die Zeit

»The Place is a narrative essay, meditative and melancholy.« KulturSPIEGEL

»Maier’s memoir is highly reflexive and analytical. Maier is of course completely himself, the 15-to-18-year-old youth he was then. But he looks at that youth and his attitude and behaviour with the intellect of the man he is today.« Der Tagesspiegel

»Maier is writing a contemporary Remembrance of Things Past, if you will, a modern Sentimental Education, a World of Yesterday. […] when we read these books we encounter ourselves, we watch ourselves grow up alongside the child Andreas and we become part of these stories that we leaf through as in a family photo album.« Nürnberger Nachrichten

»This is a powerfully affecting book that gripped me from the first paragraph. The descriptions of nature and the environment, the narrator’s struggle with the world and with himself. It took me back to my own puberty. I remembered feelings, opinions, attitudes that I thought I had long forgotten. It really is enchanting.« Hessischer Rundfunk