Five connected women in Leipzig searching for love in their own ways.

I went into this one with no expectations and what a lovely surprise it turned out to be - quietly excellent, it’s one of my favourite reads of 2021, but I’m struggling to write a review that does it justice. It reads more like five novellas that are slightly interconnected - as friends or acquaintances or rivals, the women’s lives intersect, but without fanfare. They all want (and get) different things from life and love, and have varying thoughts on what it is to love and be loved, to be a mother, to be childless, to be a good friend, to be a bad friend. The characters are all just delightfully German, which I loved - I’ve ended up with German friends almost everywhere I’ve previously lived, and this book reminded me how much I miss those friends and their…Germanness (I don’t know how else to describe it). Although not a main theme, one particularly interesting aspect of the book was the lingering effect of the postwar East-West divide on everyday life and the way people think today. A quietly excellent character study of five women and their lives, reflecting on love’s many forms and the complexities of relationships.