In the Belly of the Queen

“The novel tells two versions of the same story, both set in the Kurdish diasporic community in present-day Germany. Shahira is a single mother who serves as sort of a blank canvas for all her neighbors. They project all sorts of things onto her. We have two teenage protagonists, and in each case, they’re Shahira’s son’s best friend. In one version of the story, the teenager is a boy, and then we flip the book on its head, and in the alternate reality of the other version, the best friend is a girl. The boy is in love with Shahira and the girl really wants to be her. In each of these two versions, we have narrators with different voices and different mental worlds, different circumstances, different expectations, and yet they have the same setting with the same cast of characters around them. It’s fun because you get to turn the book upside down and start again. There’s no beginning, no order in which you’re supposed to read it. You can just decide. I love that experimentation. I think it works really well.” Read more...

The Best 21st-Century German Novels

Katy Derbyshire, Translator