Moor

In the early 1970s, thirteen-year-old Dion Katthusen is growing up without a father in a small village in northern Germany. An only child with a severe stutter, he is shunned by other children and finds comfort in nature, collecting dragonflies in a moor thick with myths and legends. Standing at the edge of adulthood, he starts to reveal the secrets of his heart: his fierce longing to speak without fault and his enduring bond with his mother, a failed painter who has secrets of her own. Dion's speech is full of cracks and gaps, much like the marshy ground around him. Nature can be sublime, but it can also be very cruel. Moor is the story of a boy trying to get free of the quicksand of loneliness, and of the demands we place on love while the people around us are hurt by their clumsy attempts to share our pain. Gunther Geltinger's novel is an experimental, mysterious portrait of childhood, written in the second person and attentive to the relationship between humans and nature and between mother and son. This is its first appearance in English, translated by Alexander Booth.