Madalyn

What happens when we are in love? Very little, and yet you remember your first love for the rest of your life. Michael Köhlmeier’s novel about Madalyn and Moritz is a heartrending tale about big emotions.

Madalyn lives on the floor below. Sebastian Lukasser, a writer, has known her since she was five years old, when he taught her how to ride a bike and later witnessed her being knocked down by a car. He becomes her rescuer and guardian angel, to whom she confides things her parents wouldn’t understand. Now Madalyn is fourteen and in the middle of her first love story, which is heart-wrenching, complicated and utterly hopeless. Because Moritz is anything but a simple case – at least as far as Lukasser can make out from what Madalyn tells him. It seems that Moritz comes from a desperately poor background and has been arrested for stealing. But he’s also a notorious liar, so it’s hard to know what to believe. But what if it’s really the truth?

Sebastian Lukasser, who was actually planning to write a novel about a young murderer, now finds himself having to listen to an entirely different story – a story about first love that hits him harder and affects him more deeply than he likes to admit.