Lemon

Little August Drach lives in a house on the edge of the village. His home is a mixture of heaven and hell. His father, disappointed in himself and in life more generally, takes out his frustration on his son. August finds solace with his mother, who lavishes him with love and attention. But when August’s father walks out on the family, his mother’s affection transforms into something different. Craving attention and admiration from the devotion she shows her son, she begins to secretly mix medications in with his food, leaving him chronically weak and sick.

It is not until years later that August manages to free himself from his mother’s clutches, tentatively piecing together a life of his own, even managing to find his first love. But he’s never quite able to solve the riddle of a childhood in which cruelty and love were tangled up in one another. He gets caught in a cycle of lies and betrayal. And when he finally returns to the site where all this pain emerged, it’s not healing and reconciliation that await him, but a chilling realisation of what he was subjected to as a child. And that sometimes the scars of the past are too deep to ever heal cleanly.

Valerie Fritsch’s new novel is written in striking, clipped language and filled with starkly delineated imagery that calls to mind the ornate illustrations of children’s books. But not from the saccharine fairy tales of Disney but the menacing moods of the Brothers Grimm. With unflinching precision, Lemon tells the story of a twisted love that makes the beloved helpless and weak, keeping them physically and mentally dependent. A love that leaves no escape but through the dark door of revenge.

»It is a pleasure to follow the tracks of [Fritsch’s] condensed language. The images she evokes are as sharp as pin pricks.« Nadine A. Brügger, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»An amazing, intense novel …« Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau

»More than a novel on a specific theme, Lemon is a highly successful attempt to find an ice-cold language for the hatred that can be hidden in love – and to tell a disturbingly compelling story at the same time.« Carsten Otte, Tagesspiegel

»Lemon is a book about violence, but more than that, it is about the powerlessness that people experience through loss and change. … Violence, Valerie Fritsch tells us with her striking imagery in this clever, disturbing and subtle book, is a weakness that is only sometimes mistaken for power or strength.« Ingo Ebener, neues deutschland

»[Lemon] is meticulously composed … The way Fritsch unfurls the relationships and inner worlds of her characters … evokes associations with the pictures of Hieronymous Bosch.« Beate Tröger, der Freitag

»In these 180 pages, the author ties together a dense, sturdy fabric. To do so, she finds a language that lives from striking images, without ever sliding into self-indulgence or kitsch. In short: a recommended read.« Richard Mayr, Augsburger Allgemeine

»In her fourth novel … Valerie Fritsch has put down on paper a dense, micro-distanced prose in the most darkly melodious cadences. The sentences are shot through with incisive turns of phrase.« Alexander Kluy, Buchkultur

»Alongside the power of lies and the burden of complicity, Lemon revolves around the transformation of the experience of violence into the exertion of violence; evil never appears in its pure form. Once again, the narrative voice observes the events precisely and with enormous empathy, without judging; once again, it describes them with an enchantingly sensuous and visual opulence...« Daniela Strigl, Die Presse