Lionheart

Monika Helfer turns her life experiences into literature. After Die Bagage and Vati: the new novel about a family from the Austrian Vorarlberg. Lionheart is an intimate portrait, a story about care, guilt and family ties.

Since the death of their mother, Monika and her sisters have been separated from their little brother Richard. They only rarely see each other, and are losing their bond. It is the late 1970s, and the Baader-Meinhof gang is turning Germany upside down. Richard is already a young man, a typesetter by trade - “the avant garde of the working class”. He is an oddball and seems not to value life very much. He will only take on any responsibility when it is thrust upon him - including when, in a highly strange move, an old lover leaves him with a child he only knows by its nickname: Putzi. As the political situation in the country grows increasingly tense, the months he spends with the girl change Richard. Unintentionally becoming a father gives him some new footing, at least for a while. Monika Helfer turns her life experience into great literature; through her novels about her family, she has become the chronicler of an entire century.



“A wonderfully lively, lightly-written story.”
- Peer Teuwsen, NZZ am Sonntag

"Lionheart is […]a topical novel, but more importantly one of the most wonderful, cheerful and sad books you’ll read this (or probably any other) year."
- Tim Wohlfarth, Taz

"Once again, Helfer displays an astonishing talent for bringing together disparate elements within the smallest of spaces, in a way that feels utterly natural: Lionheart is a family story, a portrait of an artist, and an indulgent if also slightly disquieting look back at a time when alternative lifestyles were still thought of as a way in to a more profound reality, rather than as a sign of mental illness or mere fad. Lionheart is more heart than lion: a moving memorial and belated epitaph to Richard – about whom we might say (to paraphrase Kleist) that, in truth, nothing on earth could have helped him`"
- Richard Kämmerlings, Die Welt`

"[Helfer] writes about something essentially ungraspable with a remarkable intimacy, and once again interweaves family relationships with contemporary history."
- Stern

"The trilogy gets better and better, and Lionheart is perhaps the most moving of the three."
- Andreas Wirthensohn, Wiener Zeitung