Rights Information

World rights available.

Valentina is the pub king’s wife, she lives in a neat house with two adorable daughters. Every Wednesday,
a young student comes to clean while she posts pretty pictures of her days in the suburbian idyll. What nobody
knows is that she has to count obsessively, disassociates, and forgets what she does or just did. One
day she gets a call from the police: her husband has raped a woman and admitted to it. The victim is Katja
Sziboula. She is a journalist, non-fiction writer; cold, controlled, living in a symbiotic marriage and constructive
work relationship with Kay, a linguistic professor from South Africa who teaches in Potsdam. When
Valentina arrives at the police station and the officer shows her a photograph of the victim, Valentina recognizes
herself on it, with a blue eye and a bloody lip. Did her husband really just mistake the two women,
like she thinks at first? Is Katja her supposedly dead twin whose birth and death certificate she owns? Taking
turns, Valentina, Katja and Kay tell a story that pulls the rug off from under your feet: suspenseful, shattering,
outrageous.

Author Biography

Sophie Sumburane, born 1987 in Potsdam, studied German and African Studies
at the University of Leipzig as well as at the German Institute of Literature in Leipzig.
She did her doctorate at the Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt. She is the author
of many crime novels, has written for a wide range of different media and is active
in anti-racist work. She is part of the network »Herland – Feminist realism in crime
literature« and was voted into the PEN–Zentrum in 2019.