Novel of the week Francesca Carington

LOVE IN FIVE ACTS by Daniela Krien, tr Jamie Bulloch

288PP, MACLEHOSE, £14.99, EBOOK £9.99

Leipzig-dwelling writer Daniela Krien’s second novel, Love in Five Acts, is already a bestseller in Germany. It charts the romantic lives of five women in their forties, each linked to the last in a kind of unhappy and restless relay race.

First up is Paula, a bookseller grieving the death of her baby. Her chapter is the mini-account of her doomed relationship with her eco-warrior husband, its potency amped up by the speed of its telling. Next comes Paula’s oldest friend Judith, a horse-mad doctor. Having always been proudly single, she’s now reminded of “how difficult it is to be alone” and zips through men on a horsey dating site.

One of her patients is Brida, an author struggling to be “a writer rather than a mother who wrote”. Having squirmed out of their marriage, she’s now sleeping with her ex-husband Götz. Their relationship began when Götz was dating Malika – who takes on the fourth act. Malika, the least engaging of the women, resents her parents for favouring her actress sister Jorinde. In the novel’s final chapter, Jorinde is divorcing her odious husband, is a lacklustre mother to her two children and is pregnant with a celebrity’s baby.

Krien’s writing (translated, excellently, by Jamie Bulloch) is sparse and precise. It hops about in time, but chronological confusion fades in the face of the self-contained intensity of the chapters. All of them play with the idea of womanhood as loss: of love, identity, choices, looks. Judith dreams about “a heap consisting of everything her body has lost to date”. Jorinde, returning from her lover to her children, feels “as if a butterfly were being forced back into the cocoon, to emerge again in paler colours”.

There is at least a hopeful slant to the novel’s concern with transition – encapsulated by the migration of swifts through each chapter. When the novel ends, abruptly, it feels as though for Krien’s women, the next act is still to come.