This House Is Mine

In German novelist Dörte Hansen's wry, tender debut, two women take shelter from their wounds in their family's tumbledown farmhouse.

Vera's connection to the old house in northern Germany begins in 1945, when she and her mother, Hildegard von Kamcke, arrive as refugees from East Prussia. Five-year-old Vera is destined to follow their stingy, resentful hostess, Ida Eckhoff, in calling the house her own; Hildegard marries Ida's shell-shocked son, only to abandon husband and daughter for another man after a tempestuous period of family life that culminates in Ida's suicide. Left to fend for herself and her damaged stepfather, Vera perseveres and becomes a dentist as well as a farmer, but her irascible temperament and immodest habits don't lend themselves to fitting in or finding a spouse.

In the present day, Vera's niece Anne, daughter of her half-sister, Marlene, needs a refuge when she catches the father of her preschool son naked in their kitchen with another woman. She turns to the aunt she barely knows for a place to grieve and rebuild.

Frequently humorous, This House Is Mine nevertheless strikes deep chords of isolation and abandonment. Hildegard leaves Vera a legacy of never feeling welcome or wanted; Anne inherits the same from Marlene. Overall, its message that outsiders sometimes have the power to reach out and defeat their own loneliness is hopeful, and readers who enjoyed Frederik Backman's A Man Called Ove or Monica Wood's The One-in-a-Million Boy will take eccentric, caustic Vera to their hearts. Hansen's first novel is as challenging and comforting as rural life itself. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

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