Hard Land

It's the summer of 1985 in the small town of Grady, Missouri, and fifteen-year-old Sam Turner feels like a nobody — awkward, overlooked, and increasingly isolated as his mother's illness pulls his family apart. Taking a summer job at the local movie theater, Sam is unexpectedly drawn into a tight circle of older teenagers who show him what it means to belong.

Over the course of one summer, Sam falls in love for the first time, forms the kind of friendships that define a life, and stumbles onto a mystery tied to his hometown's past that forces him to see Grady — and his own family — differently. Benedict Wells builds the novel as a direct homage to the 1980s American coming-of-age films that shaped his own childhood imagination, from Stand By Me to The Breakfast Club, translating that sensibility into a German-language novel.

Hard Land won the Jury Prize at the German Youth Literature Award in 2022 and became one of Wells's most acclaimed novels since his 2016 breakout, The End of Loneliness.