It starts with the sawn-off lady.

In her 20s, the narrator was asked by a magician if she wanted to be his assistant, accompany him home and lie in the box to test the trick.

Maybe he was a psychopath, but she said yes and survived.

Many years, a marriage

and a separation later, she wonders why she wasn't afraid and if she still lost something of herself in the box.

She has left the big city, lives alone in a house on the North German coast and is afraid at night when the wind rips open the door and a marten roams the attic.

Judith Hermann's "Hemma"

is a subtle and deeply humorous story about lonely people in an age when much has been lost and the future is not long.

In the narrator's vicinity lives her brother who runs an unprofitable restaurant and has fallen in love with a woman 40 years younger with a broken background.

There is the neighbor, the artist Mimi, who moved back to the village after three divorces, and Mimi's brother, a pig farmer who never left the farm where he was born.

In the big city

you always find the same people, but in the countryside you are referred to people who are different from yourself, who think and do things differently.

Trying to live with incompatibilities is one of the book's themes.

Another is memory and how the past affects us.

The narrator's ex-

husband, who writes letters to her, remembers everything and can even correct her own stories, while she only remembers moods, feelings.

Only later does she remember things that at least partially explain why she separated and why her daughter left home and is kayaking far away on another ocean.

But of course it never will be, and that is one of the great merits of the novel: we are kept suspended in uncertainty.

"Home" is a

suggestive story about confinement and exclusion.

Everyone in the novel is trapped in different kinds of boxes or standing outside and unable to enter.

They are painfully aware that everything must die, not only themselves but also the insects and the whales.

But the narrator is also surprised by his own desire to find home, to seize the moment and live now.

Like when the pig farmer comes to her aid equipped with a flashlight and a sledgehammer – and she finds him irresistible.

A truly irresistible book.