Unsere Stimmen bei Nacht

In "Unsere Stimmen bei Nacht", Gloria and Herbert have raised their children in an old villa on the outskirts of Berlin. With the house now too large and too quiet, they decide to rent out four rooms. Their first tenants are chemistry professor Gregor and his daughter Alissa, followed by a student named Jay, and finally Lou, a dance teacher who also works at an art-house cinema.

Gloria throws herself into cooking for the household while Herbert, who runs a secondhand bookshop on the ground floor, struggles to adjust to sharing his home with strangers. As the tenants' lives intertwine with the couple's own, the novel follows Lou in particular as she settles into the shared household, told in a calm, observational style centered on everyday domestic life rather than plot twists.

Franziska Fischer, born in Berlin in 1983, studied German and Spanish philology and works as a freelance author and editor; this is one of her contemporary literary novels about the quiet dynamics of shared living.