My Street

Barbara Honigmann specialises in writing about life’s great dramas and losses. Here she presents a memoir devoted to a single street – the inconspicuous French street where she has lived for over twenty years.

Barbara Honigmann lives in Strasbourg – far from the famous city centre with its parks, cathedral and the European Parliament. But who needs all that when there’s so much diversity right outside your window? Orthodox and less orthodox Jews, the oddly isolated »sons and daughters of the Caucasus«; a three-legged dog; an elderly lady who doesn’t shrink from planting flowers on strangers’ balconies; a black priest in a white robe and a stark-naked man tanning his backside in the sun. However disparate their origins, they all share a feeling of otherness, of »not being from here«.

Honigmann encounters a microcosm of the whole world in her own street – the result is a book that only life itself could write.