The Last Patient

She sat at the kitchen table, smoking, exuding a “seductive world-weariness of the kind familiar from the films of the Nouvelle Vague”. After turning her back on the country she’d been born in, Luxembourg, and the parents who had raised her, the protagonist of this new novel by Ulrike Edschmid turns up in the narrator’s share house in Frankfurt in 1973. Having been left by a man, she was looking for a room. Three years later, after falling in love with a Spanish anarchist, she follows him to Barcelona.

After a few more abortive relationships, she leaves Europe for the Americas, with stints in Arizona, Mexico City, Guatemala, Buenos Aires, but after years of a peripatetic life and countless “desperate attempts at love”, she finally finds her way back to Barcelona, where she trains to become a psychotherapist, specialising in trauma.

One day, a young woman arrives at her practice who doesn’t speak. Years go by before the first words escape her lips. Has she been the victim of some horrible crime? Or is the darkness that leaves her mute the product of psychosis? What’s clear is that this patient will give her therapist – now gravely ill with cancer – the love she couldn’t find anywhere else in the world.

Ulrike Edschmid tells this moving, disturbing, and ultimately consoling story as is customary for her work: concise and sparse, delivering a dense book that retains a remarkable deftness of touch.

»Her books are slim. But they possess an enormous impact.« FAZ