Sold to Finland!

Adina’s story – the winner novel of the German Book Award 2021 by Antje Rávik Strubel – will be out in Finnish: Minerva just acquired rights to BLAUE FRAU (S. Fischer)!

„Why did you not kill him?“ I asked.

The blue woman puts her fingers to her temples and pulls the skin tight back.

The eyes get narrow, the face a laughing mask.
„Why me?“

Adina was the last teenager to grew up in her village in the Czech Giant Mountains, and already as a child, longed to get away. While attending a language course in Berlin, she meets a photographer called Rickie, who gets her an internship in an up-and-coming arts and leisure centre in the Uckermark. Rendered invisible by a sexual assault which no one takes seriously, Adina gets stranded in Helsinki after wandering around aimlessly. In the hotel in which she is working illegally, she meets the Estonian Professor Leonides, a Member of the European Parliament, who falls in love with her. While he campaigns for human rights, Adina searches for a way out of her inner exile.

»Strubel’s powerful and artfully composed story about the young Czech woman Adina is a Euro-novel

about a two-class society, a queer East-West story, and a feminist human rights plea« – Der Standard

»a powerful novel about female self-empowerment« – Luxemburger Wort

»In linguistic terms, „Blue Woman“ is breathtakingly poetic. Nothing is kitschy, nothing is sentimental,

nothing about the character is encroaching.« – EMMA

»Strubel has written a complex and clever book that in many ways raises the question of the possibility

of justice at all levels.« – Wiener Zeitung

»Sensitive, often almost lyrical, always gentle but never euphemistic.« –  Münchner Merkur

»How Adina, through her sensory impressions, gradually begins to rediscover herself, to approach the trauma,

captivates page after page.« – Stern online

»I think the novel is really brilliant great.« – NDR Kultur

»Thus, this blue woman is part, sometimes also catalyst, of a book that tries to find a language for the consequences

of male power structures. A book that writes against imposed speechlessness.« – SRF

»Strubel’s novel […] is a delicately composed fabric that, in a serious, almost solemn way, attempts to mirror

fractures in female identity in the complicated process of EU unification.« – junge Welt

»Told without compromise (…) and with an elemental force.« – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»She artfully connects time levels and narrative perspectives.« – Der SPIEGEL

»But the way she transforms this heavy material into a floating prose […] is one of the most emphatic reading

experiences of this book autumn.« – Augsburger Allgemeine

»a great success« – Badische Zeitung

»The structure is particularly exciting. Because again and again the levels are mixed, the real is combined

with dream sequences. […] Plenty of food for thought!« – Donaukurier

»captivating, clever, poetic, […] full of the most precise descriptions – and still can’t quite be grasped in the end.

Blue Woman‘ is a masterpiece.« – Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten

»a great, haunting novel in the area of tension between the individual and society.« – Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung

»In memorable sentences, Strubel’s alter ego and the mysterious blue woman develop a poetics of discretion.« –  Die Zeit

»a novel of great linguistic and inventive power.« –  Der Freitag

»Blue Woman is a book that you put down feeling changed.« – MDR Kultur

»Strubel tells us this, compelling and beautiful, psychologically clear and rigorously differentiated, against the pale glow

of the Finnish landscape: a great, touching story!« – ARD

«it sharpens the eye, it sharpens empathy, as great literature always does, for what is going on before our eyes and

what we all too often block out.« – WDR 2

»A linguistically impressive journey as well.« – Die Presse (Spectrum)

»With inescapable force, the novel drifts toward an act of violence.« – Sächsische Zeitung

»uncompromisingly told […] with elemental force.« – FAZ.net

»Strubel unfolds her story in precise observations, showing looks, behaviors, dress, tone,

habitus of her characters.« – Berliner Zeitung

»[…] a highly ambitious interplay between present snapshots and the psychic burdens of the past.« – Abendzeitung München

»a very complex, gripping book.« – Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»Passages of lyrical language intensity are found next to political statements, bitter pasts lead to a – perhaps –

brighter future […].« – WDR3

»A gripping novel about the right to tell your own story: Antje Rávik Strubel’s BLUE WOMAN is the portrait of a woman

—and of Europe.« – Der Tagesspiegel

»What seems straightforward and clear when summarized is unfolded by Strubel in all its complexity and

contradictoriness: the power of trauma to annihilate one’s existence.« – Die Welt/Literarische Welt

»An incredibly multi-layered, intelligent, political, psychological novel.« – rbb Kultur

»[Strubel is] a master of interior states (…) From the very first pages of her gleaming novel, BLUE WOMAN,

you’re irresistibly pulled into her story.« – Süddeutsche Zeitung

»She has mastered the art of articulating what should be unspeakable without having to resort to hyperbolic language« – Bayerischer Rundfunk

»A lyrical and always suspenseful novel about Europe, memory, violence, and love.« – Deutsche Welle

»Excitingly quiet and artfully composed.« – rbb Inforadio

»With existential force and poetic precision, Antje Rávik Strubel describes a young woman’s escape from her memories of rape. Layer by layer, the stirring novel exposes what happened. The story of female self-empowerment expands into a reflection on rival cultures of memory in Eastern and Western Europe and power imbalances between the sexes. In a tentative narrative movement, Antje Rávik Strubel succeeds in giving voice to what is actually unspeakable about a traumatic experience. In the dialogue with the mythical figure of the Blue Woman, the narrator condenses her intervening poetics: literature as a fragile counter-power that opposes injustice and violence despite all despair.« – Jury of the German Book Award 2021