Forget grammar drills. Read a real novel in German today, not next year.
Micha is fifteen and new in Berlin. He has no friends here, and he reads while he walks. One afternoon he steps onto the tram tracks with a book in his hand, and a stranger pulls him back. The stranger is Lila Pechstein. She paints, and she lives in an old house on Greifswalder Straße with three other women and a hedgehog that may or may not be poisonous. Micha keeps going back to that house. It is the first place in Berlin where nobody wants him to be anyone else, and it is the one thing Lila is about to lose: an investor wants the property. He begins writing things down in a white notebook: his mother, his father, Tanja from his class, the tram that came from the left. The story follows him from that afternoon into his adult life, and back to Berlin. The book opens with a line the author means literally: Eine wahre Geschichte. Meine Geschichte. Boris Anderson is a co-author of the award-winning German television series "Turkish for Beginners". He first told this story for learners of German in his A2 novel "Fliegen verboten". The present book is its A1 version, rewritten at the lower level rather than abridged: present tense, short sentences, and the vocabulary of Goethe-Zertifikat A1. German words outside that range are glossed in English at the foot of the page where they occur, so the book can be read without a dictionary.
Boris Anderson
Berliner Drehbuchautor. Co-Autor von "Türkisch für Anfänger."
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