One Another
Monique Schwitter

Translated from the German by Tess Lewis

When a writer googles the name of her first love and discovers he committed suicide years ago, she is deeply shaken. Memories of Petrus begin to flood into her mind, followed by the memories of other loves, one after another.  What exactly is love?  How does it come and go?  She begins to search her personal history for answers. Twelve men. Twelve chapters in a novel.  Melancholy Petrus, handsome actor Jakob, Simon with his pet rat, gay Nathanael, a student, her brother.  Her husband’s story is supposed to be the last.  But as story after story unfolds, the past and present entangle until her orderly search is interrupted by present-day complications of love and by a startling event overlooked at home that begins to seize the plotline of both her art and life.
One Another dazzles as Monique Schwitter deftly weaves an intricate, moving, and wonderfully eccentric portrayal of love and art—erotic, chaotic, comedic, tragic, and glorious.

“Nimble, entertaining, and at the same time unobtrusively profound: if only we could say this of books more often”
—Die Presse (Austria)

“Monique Schwitter... [has] the gentlest gaze and the hardest kick.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)

Monique Schwitter was born in 1972 in Zurich, Switzerland, and now lives in Hamburg, Germany. She is the award-winning author of novels, short stories, and plays. Her first story collection won the 2006 Robert Walser Prize. Goldfish Memory, her most recent collection, is her only other work in English translation, published in 2015.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-497-3 / 224 pages / Fiction