| Petra van Cronenburg: THORN-APPLE
AND BELLADONNA
Recipes of a happy
separation
Novel
Approx. 256 pages
3-404-92181-X BLT
Petra van Cronenburg
studied theology and Judaism and became a freelance journalist. From 1993 to 1997 the
author lived in Warsaw (Poland), where she distributed reports on women and culture in
English and Polish from her own media agency. Today, the journalist, book author, and
publicist lives in Alsace, France.
Life is as
cruel as an afternoon soap
Forty-year-old Karen is a
hard-working script writer, repeatedly just missing her big break through. When her
husband Jean suddenly leaves her after 15 years of marriage in France, she attempts
suicide in manner worthy of any film. But this simple solution to all her problems ends in
a slap-stick disaster.
What is left is a confused
woman, who has lost her feel for how life is supposed to work. Karen would gladly serve
her husband's young lover a poisonous salad of thorn-apple and belladonna, but that is as
little help to her as the divorce suggestions she gets from well-meaning friends. Only one
thing is certain: she needs happiness, promptly!
With desperate courage, and
with a good portion of vitality, she leaps into her new life - and not only goes to the
dogs. As a result she discovers that happiness is not where you look for it.
Petra van Cronenburg knows how
women experience the feeling of being separated. That is the trick she uses to write a
book which is amusing and encouraging as well as distinctive: delicately ironical, fresh
and arrestingly straight-forward.
***
"I cannot remember
having ever read a book which has been at the same time so funny, amusing and poetic. I
laughed tears and I cried tears. I just wanted to start reading a little bit and then I
could not stop. It grips, it is sensuously intoxicating - and sometimes it really touches
on a sore point." (amazon.de )
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