THE CRUMB OF BREAD

• Lukas Bärfuss’s new novel takes us back to the 1970s and explores issues which also shape our present.
  
• Lukas Bärfuss was awarded a.o. the Georg Büchner Prize, the Swiss Book Prize and the Berlin Literature Prize.
• Rights to Vaters Kiste were sold to France (Éditions Zoé), Italy (L'Orma) and Korea (Maracas Publishing).
• English sample translation available.

The life of a woman: sometimes there’s not enough love. And there’s never enough money.

Adelina, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, is working in a factory in Switzerland when her brief marriage ends and she is left to look after her daughter, Emma, alone. A painful struggle for survival begins – until she meets an elderly Belgian man and moves to his estate in Piedmont. Life becomes easier in many ways, but without love it remains stale and dull. And one day the Belgian man disappears, taking the child with him. Soon afterwards another man turns up – a drifter, a criminal. Together they set out in search of Emma. The man often goes away for a while and returns with money, food and newspapers featuring reports of robberies and raids on munitions depots. He takes Adelina back to his own community in Milan, and for the first time she feels like part of a group. She learns how to shoot a gun, delivers messages, and stays out of the way of the police. This is not difficult, because the police currently have their hands full. In this time of bombs and violence, a mother searches for her daughter – and for a long time she finds no trace of her. Until the drifter says he has seen the lights go on at the estate: there is a man there, a man with a child.