★ About loss and the people who remain behind: the story of what happened afterwards.
★ A thousand words for emptiness

There is a photo album on the table. Inside: photos of Etty as a baby. Etty at the age of four in the swimming pool. Etty and Eleven playing mini golf. Etty on her doorstep at the age of fourteen, shortly before her violent death. The danger that women and girls are exposed to in this world has now come close to the narrator's attention. Because Etty was the daughter of her best friend Heide. From now on, their world is subject to a second beat. Where Etty's life ended, another life begins for her. What remains are these photos, the memories and so many questions: How to continue living? How to get up every day? How to continue to stay in the apartment where Etty was at home? How her laughter, her cheeky answers, her delicate facial features remember her without breaking? The actually impossible attempt to understand what has happened becomes an attempt to function.

In a state of suspension, charged with love, underpinned with helplessness.
With impressive precision, Marlen Pelny sheds light on the story of a femicide from the perspective of the survivors and lets us feel overwhelming emotions. She shows what it means to be left behind. When a mother is granted two days of special leave for mourning. When folders full of bureaucracy have to be processed - at the top there is the birth and death certificate, which can now be used to summarize Etty's entire life. When the sadness turns into a throbbing headache and you can no longer imagine life without him. But also: How it feels when your own city, Berlin, where you not only felt at home but also free, suddenly becomes a danger zone.

“Every now and then we’ll put our heads on the scales and see if they get lighter over time.”
Here a delicate and at the same time powerful voice speaks so approachably that you definitely don't want to leave it alone. Clear but not voyeuristic, merciless but not brutal, it tells the story of loss and consolation, of grief and love, of what comes afterward. This novel is a linguistically powerful rebellion: against injustice that kills. Against the violence that we encounter every day and that we try to survive.

Marlen Pelny postered German cities with poetry and published the volumes of poetry “Auftakt” (2007) and “We only have to kill the animals” (2013). She not only puts her words on walls and paper, but also makes them sound with her band Zuckerklub. Her clear poetry also flows through her debut novel “Liebe / Liebe” (2021), for which the author was awarded the Klopstock Sponsorship Prize 2022. In her second novel, “Why We Are Still Here,” she tells the story of connection in her own, haunting style.