Two sisters: one works on all the injustices of our present, the other on the bourgeois family ideal; for one, being black is a political category, for the other, being a mother. In her debut novel, Yandé Seck tells of the ambivalences that we have to endure in both small and large ways in a clever, illuminating and subtly witty way.

Dieo lives with her husband Simon and three sons in a beautiful old apartment in Frankfurt's Nordend district. She suffers from society's unfulfillable demands on her as a mother, but above all it is her younger sister Zazie's constant criticism of everything and everyone that frays her nerves. Simon, a middle-aged white man and employee in a financial start-up, is also repeatedly targeted by his sister-in-law, who increasingly despairs at the racist and sexist society.

When the sisters' father, a stubborn Nietzsche fan who came to Germany from Senegal more than forty years ago, dies unexpectedly, the painstakingly calibrated family structure is thrown off balance. The sisters travel to their father's country for the funeral. The farewell becomes a new beginning for both of them - in many ways. (Publisher)