Andrea Heuser
Augustas Garten
Roman
224 pages
First day of sale: 01.10.2014
ISBN 978-3-8321-9763-6
ANDREA HEUSER
AUGUSTAS GARTEN / AUGUSTA’S GARDEN
A Novel
Ca. 176 pages
Autumn 2014
A painfully beautiful mother-daughter story
A delicately drawn, sensitive debut novel
A touching story about closeness and betrayal, love and loss
When the 5-year-old Augusta leaves home with her mother Barbara, she cannot imagine that it is also a farewell from her previous life. She does not like the place where they will soon move. And she also does not like Eduard, her mother’s friend. But Barbara does not tell her daughter the truth. When Augusta asks when they will return home, she always answers with an indeterminate “soon”. Augusta draws solace from this word, but on her sixth birthday she is forced to realise she will never return to her father. Augusta runs away.
While the police look for the child, her mother becomes frantic. Her life has always been shaped by fleeing and the desperate search for stability. Barbara is repeating the her family’s fatal mistake, altering her daughter’s life forever.
“Augustas Garten” is the poetical and touching story of a separation and the longing for a new beginning, a story about vanishing and the tragic consequences of staying silent too long. It is a novel that grows on your heart.
Andrea Heuser
Andrea Heuser, born in Cologne in 1972, now lives with her family in Munich. She studied German language and literature, politics and comparative religious studies in Cologne and Bonn. In 2008, she published her poetry debut “vor dem verschwinden” (“before disappearing”), for which she was awarded the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize of the Literarischer März Darmstadt, among others. In 2012 she was one of the finalists for the Merano Poetry Prize. Her debut novel “Augustas Garten” (2014) has been published by DuMont. For her work on “Wenn wir heimkehren” (“When We Come Home”) she received the Literary Scholarship of the Free State of Bavaria in 2016.
