The Present Day
Bestseller, Literary Fiction, Fiction
‘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
• Over 180,000 copies sold of 'On Getting Up: Tales of a Life'
• For readers of Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, and Arno Geiger ('The Old King in His Exile')
Helga Schubert, born in 1940 in Berlin, studied psychology at Humboldt University. She worked as a psychotherapist and writer in East Germany. As press officer for the Central Round Table, she helped prepare for the first free elections. After publishing numerous books, she retreated from the public literary space. This changed in 2020 when she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her story Getting Up. A volume of short stories of the same name was published by dtv in 2021 and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
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‘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
• Over 180,000 copies sold of 'On Getting Up: Tales of a Life'
• For readers of Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, and Arno Geiger ('The Old King in His Exile')