Norbert Gstrein: Im ersten Licht

In the organizer's words:

Two world wars, one century: an idiosyncratic life full of beauty, tragedy and contradictions. Norbert Gstrein tells almost a century of violent history in his new novel Im ersten Licht (Hanser Verlag, 2026).

Norbert Gstrein gives us an entire human life. Yet every life is fragile in this novel, which begins with an axe blow: Adrian's father makes him unfit for the First World War as a teenager, perhaps saving him. The stubborn, tender man who from then on limps through more than eighty years of life is the miracle of this story. Adrian twice sees his world come to an end, twice has to deal with young men who were less fortunate than him, and in old age experiences the unexpected love story of a man who was brought up to do everything but love. How to live in the shadow of war and killing? With a fearless look into the past, Im ersten Licht confronts this great question of the present.

Norbert Gstrein, born in Tyrol in 1961, lives in Hamburg. He has received the Alfred Döblin Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Austrian Book Prize 2019, the Düsseldorf Literature Prize and the Thomas Mann Prize, among others. He is the author of many novels and short stories, including Der zweite Jakob (novel, 2021), with which he was nominated for the German Book Prize, and most recently Vier Tage, drei Nächte (novel, 2022) and Mehr als nur ein Fremder (2023).

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