Love in Five Acts

· MacLehose Press · Narrated by Shazia Nicholls
Audiobook
7 hr 5 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

"Highly recommended" Sunday Times

"Utterly captivating" Woman and Home

"Sympathetic and clear-eyed" Financial Times Summer Reads of 2021

"Unfailingly impressive" Irish Times

"Sparse and precise" Telegraph

"A beautiful novel of what it is to be a women in modern Europe" New European

"An intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty" Observerr

Five women attempt the impossible - to love, to be strong, and to stay true to themselves.

Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone?

Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice.

Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

Spiegel #1 bestseller - More than 150,000 copies sold in Germany

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

(P)2021 Quercus Editions Limited

About the author

Daniela Krien was born in 1975 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, then in the G.D.R. Her first novel, Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything, was published in English in 2013 (MacLehose Press) and in fourteen other languages. For a subsequent volume of short stories, Muldental, she was awarded the Nicolaus Born Prize. Love in Five Acts has been sold for translation into twenty languages. She lives in Leipzig with her two daughters.

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