German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis)
Hey, Good Morning, How Are You?
A sleepless performance artist tries to keep hold of herself between caregiving, work, and online conversations. Love and fiction, loneliness and release, collide in a voice that moves lightly even as it brushes against mythic images.
Work Information
In the weight of everyday life, fiction becomes the only doorway to freedom.
Juno cares for her sick husband while continuing her stage work, and on sleepless nights she slips into conversations with strangers online. As the border between fraud and intimacy grows unstable, the novel becomes a light yet sharp exploration of everyday pressure and imaginative freedom.
Review Summaries
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The restrained style and the way the novel traces everyday exhaustion alongside online self-reinvention earn strong praise. At the same time, some readers read the deliberate emotional distance as coldness or thinness.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Fig Tree
- Published
- 2026-04-30
- Pages
- 224 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.6 x 1.9 x 21.6 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780241772683
- ISBN-10
- 0241772680
- Price
- 3994 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Thrillers/Psychological & Suspense
THE SPIEGEL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE 2024: a woman finds solace in her interactions with internet scammers in this electric and moving novel about communication and isolation, needs and desires, and how far we are prepared to go for love 'A triumph of sharp wit and profound humanity ... A divine masterpiece' Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' Juno Isabella Flock is a dancer and performance artist who spends her days caring for her ailing husband, and her nights chatting to love scammers online. She’s aware of the risks these men pose – she’s watched a documentary about them – but she’s also discovered a heady freedom in these online conversations, and the things they allow her to say. When Juno meets Owen_Wilson223 – or, to use his real name, Benu - she senses an immediate connection between them, even though they're separated by thousands of miles. Gradually, they reveal more and more about themselves to each other: about their real selves, and about who they really want to be. And just as Juno sees through Benu’s lies, he sees through hers too. Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? is a whirlwind of a novel. It’s about yearning to stay young while age marches on; it’s about how to stay truthful while the internet changes everything; it’s about love and desire in all their many, conflicting forms. And most of all, it’s a novel about the way we are all connected, by the same constellations and the same night sky, however different our circumstances. 'My book of the year. So sad and yet so funny, so elegant and tender [...] about illness and old age and loneliness and the internet and the beauty of fiction. There hasn't been a more worthy winner of the German Book Prize in a long time ' Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World 'It's a long time since I read such an unusual, dazzling, idiosyncratic novel, one that tells so much about us and our reality. And it's also a lot of fun' rbb TRANSLATED BY LINDA L. GAUS
Martina Hefter is an author and performer based in Leipzig. Her texts move between poetry, scenic forms of writing, and novelistic writing. She stages many of her texts in collaboration with other artists. In Germany, she has published three novels, and five volumes of poetry. Her novel Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? won the German Book Prize in 2024, and is her first work to be translated into English. Linda L. Gaus (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in German Literature from the University of California-Berkeley. She has been a professional translator and teacher of German for the past 30 years. She lives outside of Washington, DC with her husband and 2 cats.