Was man von hier aus sehen kann

MARIANA LEKY
WAS MAN VON HIER AUS SEHEN KANN /
WHAT YOU CAN SEE FROM HERE
A Novel, ca. 220 pp., Autumn 2017 – English sample available

950,000 copies sold
SPIEGEL Bestseller
Independent Booksellers’ Favourite Novel 2017

 “In What You Can See from Here, Mariana Leky has succeeded in writing probably one of the most uplifting books of the year. On every page, there are at least three sentences that you have to underline, copy out or read to someone else.” Judith Liere, STERN

 “Why should you read a book like this? The answer is simple: because Mariana Leky wrote it, and because her writing will make you drop to your knees. (...) It covers many subjects – friendship and love, courage and despair, habit and change, life and death. But you should read it, above all, to be amazed by Mariana Leky’s terrific art of language, over and over again” Katharina Mahrenholtz, NDR


A GREAT LOVE IN THE WESTERWALD
Selma, an elderly resident of the Westerwald, can foresee death - someone in the village always dies the day after the okapi appears in her dreams. However, the dreams never reveal who is going to die. As you can imagine, the span of time between dream and death exists as a state of emergency for everybody in the village - and in her novel, Mariana Leky describes the fear of the local residents, what they blindly risk, admit, destroy, or bring into order. Yet that is not everything, by far.

What You Can See From Here is the portrait of a village and its residents. But above all it is a novel about love in the state of absence, as the various “objects of desire” have a strong tendency to withdraw (or at least, to not respond in a manner acceptable to the other individuals involved). As does incredibly handsome Frederik, Luise’s great love. Luise, Selma’s granddaughter, is the heroine and narrator of the novel.

Frederik decided to move to Japan and to live in a cloister as a Buddhist monk, returning to the village and Luise only for a few weeks every winter. Each time – winter after winter – Luise is hoping for him to stay for good. But words like “forever” are not frequently said in a place over which the Sword of Damocles is hovering in form of the okapi dream….

Rights sold to: Azoth Books (Complex Chinese Characters); Hunan Literature & Art Publishing House (Simplified Chinese Characters); Prostor (Czech); OLGA (Danish); Nieuw Amsterdam (Dutch); Farrar, Straus and Giroux (English World); Varrak (Estonian); JC Lattès (French); Gutenberg (Greek); Kinneret, Zmora, Dvir (Hebrew); Tericum (Hungarian); Tousen (Japanese); Keller Editore (Italian); Taurus Books (Korean); Janis Roze (Latvian); Kitos Knygos (Lithuanian); Otwarte (Polish); Tusquets (Portuguese Brazil); Text (Russian); Ikar (Slovak); Čarobna knjiga (Serbian); Vida (Slovene); Seix Barral (Spanish World); Thorén & Lindskog (Swedish); Siren (Turkish); Vivat (Ukrainian);