The haunting and intimate account of a group of young adults trying to come to terms with a friend’s premature death.

Ananke’s death rips a huge hole in the lives of their friends. A member of the group reflects on their shared mourning, remembering times past: childhood holidays and idyllic summers, as well as tensions and arguments. Ananke is a constant, enigmatic presence, yet remains mysterious and out of reach. When the numbness of trauma becomes too much to bear, the group impulsively takes a road trip to dig up Ananke’s ashes and bring them back to the sea by the hut where Ananke used to live.

Stern’s contemplative, ethereal yet vivid prose brings heightened sensibility to the present moment and the obliquity of memory. Flouting gender pronouns and written entirely in lowercase, all this here, now. is a vision of a more collectively grounded fiction where ‘we’ is stronger than ‘I’. The effect is as meditative as it is compulsively engaging, delivered in Damion Searls’s distinctive translation.

Winner of the Swiss Book Prize
Winner of the Prisma Prize for LGBTQI+ Literature