After her debut The Summer, Ronya Othmann presents her second novel: a gripping literary testimony.

"I have seen. The self is a witness. It speaks, and yet it has no language." This is how she describes the process of storytelling. She wants to find a form for the unspeakable, the genocide of the Ezidi population, the seventy-fourth, perpetrated by IS fighters in Shingal in 2014.

Seventy-four is a journey to the origins, to the crime scenes: to the camps and the front lines, to the living rooms of relatives and on to an Ezidi village in Turkey where no one lives today. It's about looking, listening, bearing witness, linking images and reports with her own history, with her life as a journalist and author in Germany.

Ronya Othmann creates a work of immense density, necessary clarity and rigor. Her voice is one of diaspora, which also leaves deep traces in the reader. (Publisher)