Martin Mosebach’s novel What Was Before opens with a young couple enjoying a moment of carefree intimacy. Then the young woman, turning slightly more serious, asks her lover that fateful question, one that sounds so innocent but carries toxic seeds of jealousy: What was your life like before you met me? The answer grows into an entire book, an elaborate house of cards, filled with intrigue, sex, betrayal, exotic birds, and far-flung locations. Set against the backdrop of Frankfurt’s affluent suburbs, this elliptical tale of coincidence and necessity unfolds through a series of masterly constructed vignettes, which gradually come together to form a scintillating portrait of the funny, tender, and destructive guises that love between two people can assume and the effect it has on everyone around them. Hailed in Germany as the first great social novel of the twenty-first century, What Was Before is an Elective Affinities for our time.

What Was Before (The German List)

Literature & Fiction

Martin Mosebach

Humor & Satire

Seagull Books

Häresie der Formlosigkeit

Carl Hanser Verlag

Du sollst dir ein Bild machen

Rowohlt Taschenbuch

Die Türkin

Was davor geschah

Jumbo Neue Medien

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Books by Martin Mosebach