Ursula has both feet firmly on the ground: She’s young, in love, just happily married and together with her husband Joachim she has just renovated a little house and is looking forward to the first vacation together. But when she wakes up the morning before their holiday Joachim has disappeared, she is no longer at her house, and there are frost patterns on her window which she finds quite unusual for it being in the middle of July: Mysteriously she finds herself thrown back into the past, into the apartment of her overbearing aunt Priska, the gray everyday life awaiting her at the office – a life that marriage had just released her from. In vain she tries to expedite the course of events and to reach her husband who does not know anything about her yet until she realizes that she has to go the same path as unchanged as possible. But will everything fit together in the end, so that the encounter that made her life take such a lucky turn will actually take place again? Or will what at first seemed like a mean set-back in reality turn out to be a second chance? Like Marlen Haushofer, Hannelore Valencak deserves to be read by a new Generation. “Summer Window” was first published in 1967 under the title “Zuflucht

Born in Romania between the wars, raised in poverty and washed up in Austria by the turmoil of war, Mrs Berta’s life was one of humiliation, pain and misery. Now in an old people’s home, she describes these violent events to the narrator. He in turn lives in the Pension Adler, with various tattooed, one-armed guests, as well as kindly Swedish women. In the home, with its shifty inmates and carers, he begins to feel comfortable, and takes detailed notes of Mrs Berta’s story. Max Blaeulich’s novel illuminates every shade of despair there is. Yet existential loneliness has seldom been described with such assured language and unsparing precision since Kafka.

In an unnamed wasteland we see the blinking lights of Lightraff, an artificial town that was speedily built around an oil refinery and promises work in a world destroyed by climate disasters. Koslov, a barkeeper in Darkraff, is hoping to find his luck there, just like famer Schreiber and super slick Haye, who even managed to get a job in the municipality. The three share more than their hopes for better life in Lightraff: They share a single bed in shifts – eight hours a night for each man. Once the oil runs dry and the city's tight structure starts to flail, the three bed-sharers meet for the first time. Henceforth, things simply can't go well…