Alte Sorten

Ewald Arenz's Alte Sorten brings together Sally, a teenager who has run away from a psychiatric clinic, and Liss, an older woman living alone on a struggling farm in rural Franconia. Forced into each other's company by circumstance, the two women — decades apart in age and radically different in temperament — slowly build an unlikely trust over the course of a single summer of farm work.

Arenz, a schoolteacher and novelist from Nuremberg, writes in spare, understated prose about isolation, old wounds, and the kind of freedom that comes from being seen without judgment. The novel builds its tension quietly, through the rhythms of physical labor and half-spoken histories rather than plot twists.