We Would Have Told Each Other Everything - Paperback

by Judith Hermann (Author), Katy Derbyshire (Translator)

A wise and subtle work that explores the refractive power of memory, and what it means to exist in the lives of others-from one of the most highly regarded writers working in Germany today.

When Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst in the middle of the night on Berlin's Kastanienallee, the meeting sparks an exploration of the moments and memories that have made a life: an intense friendship with another young mother; an unconventional childhood with long summers spent on the German coast; and the ties of familial trauma that echo through generations.

In three interconnected sections at once confessional and lyrical, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything explores how the life and work of the writer converge and depart from each other when memory is no longer reliable and dreams intrude on reality.

Author Biography

Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of several novels and story collections, including Alice, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; Where Love Begins; and Summerhouse, Later, which won the Kleist Prize. Her novel Daheim (Home) was a Spiegel bestseller, won the Rheingau and the Bremen Literature Prizes, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages, and a number of her short stories have been adapted for film. She lives and works in Berlin.

Katy Derbyshire is the translator of contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Heike Geissler, Olga Grjasnowa, Annett Gröschner, and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer's Bricks and Mortar won the 2018 Straelen Prize for Translation. She is the cohost of a monthly translation lab and the bimonthly Dead Ladies Show.