The Present Day
»One of us might be gone by tomorrow.«
He and she have lived side by side, sharing their lives for over fift y years. But now, he is very ill. In palliative care for a long time now, his movements are becoming more and more limited, his dependence on others greater, his visitors fewer. Told over the course of one day, Helga Schubert’s tale is one of how to maintain one’s sanity, and of how to maintain the other’s dignity. It is a tale of what it is like to hold a person’s hand as they tread the line between life and death, of how love transforms, slowly but surely, into mercy. This tenderly funny yet unsentimental story meanders through shared and individual pasts.
- A touching declaration of love for the man always at her side, the man who made life worth living amid the adversities of old age
- 2020 Bachmann Prize winner
- For readers of Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, and Arno Geiger ('The Old King in His Exile')
Helga Schubert, born in 1940 in Berlin, was a psychotherapist and writer in the GDR. She had withdrawn from public literary life until she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2020 with her story ‘On Getting Up’. The eponymous volume of short stories was published by dtv in 2021 and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. ‘This Day. A Book of Hours on Love’ was published in 2023, and in 2024, Helga Schubert was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit.
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