Love in Five Acts

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

2022 Longlist

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.

About the Author/Translator

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, has been published in fourteen 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.

Jamie Bulloch is the translator of novels by Timur Vernes, Steven Uhly, Robert Menasse, Arno Geiger and Ronald Schimmelpfennig, and of crime fiction by Romy Hausmann, Sebastian Fitzek, Oliver Bottini and Peter Beck. He won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2014 for his translation of Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast.

Librarian’s Comments

Their names are Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde, they are booksellers, doctors, writers, music teachers and actresses. Each of the five women is the focus of a chapter in the novel, in which their life stories are artfully linked with references to their lives before and after. The forty-somethings live in a variety of family constellations, experienced the social upheaval of 1989/90 in East Germany, have experiences of loss and longings, search for the right life and for love – a love that will stand the test of time. After her debut novel “Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen” (Someday we’ll tell each other everything) and the short story collection “Muldental” (Mulde Valley), Daniela Krien is once again able to convince with her fascinating language. She gives each narrative voice a special sound and rhythm, tells the stories precisely, enlightens a lot about contemporary society. Leipziger Städtische Bibliotheken, Germany