"In the most beautiful misunderstanding, life is tender": That is one of those sentences that flare up in "Messer, Tongues", the debut novel by Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner, and then stay in the mind of its readers.

From South Africa, the book spans Germany and the USA, from the colonization by Boers and British to the struggle to end apartheid in the early 1990s to the present day.

In between: memories, experiences, moments, fragments of life at the Cape of Good Hope, but also in Germany after emigration.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Once it is said of a character whose name is simply Girl that when she reads she crosses out the names of characters who might resemble her.

"You are everywhere, in all the books," she is told.

A nice answer - but it's not true for girls.

We spoke to Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner about the big topic of "knives, tongues", the tension between belonging and assignment, multilingualism and understanding, human violence and human warmth in South Africa, questions about one's own story when telling it of a story and how something can appear in writing that was not consciously written into it.

A new literature puzzle, June's solution and winner announcement round out this episode of the books podcast.

“Messer, Tongues” by Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner (or, as the cover says, SGL) was published by Matthes und Seitz Berlin, has 200 pages and costs 20 euros.

Every Sunday morning, the FAZ books podcast alternately publishes talks about books and topics, interviews with authors, readings, literary puzzles and recitations from the Frankfurt anthology.

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