Product Description

Mrs Sartoris is a provincial German woman, a bourgeois wife and mother. Yet she harbours secrets and enmities which have been simmering since her teenage rejection by a well-born lover. She is calculating, narcissistic, passionate and deadly, but remains within a grey, conventional existence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #412295 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 143 pages

From the Inside Flap
An explosive first novel – ‘Madame Bovary’ in modern Germany - about a wife and mother whose failed love affairs have driven her to the edge of sanity and to a startling attempt at vindication. After being jilted by a rich boyfriend, Margaret, eighteen and heartbroken, throws herself into a comfortable but stifling marriage to Ernst, a war veteran with a penchant for routine and order, who still lives with his mother in a small German village.

It’s not a bad life, considering Margaret’s psychological scars, but neither Ernst’s adoration nor the birth of a daughter can reawaken her frozen emotions. Until she slides into an affair with a married man with whom she plans to run away. Her plan is a fantasy that cannot possibly come true. Its repercussions nevertheless will explode with unimaginable force in these astonished lives.

About the Author
Elke Schmitter was born in 1961 in Krefeld, Germany and studied philosophy in Munich. She worked as a journalist until 1994, when she became a full-time writer.

Customer Reviews

Beautifully observed
This sad story is about an ordinary life twisted by disappointments, some minor and some not so minor, into a tragedy of terrible proportions for the family involved.

Exquisitely structured and full of beautifully observed passages, with almost throw-away sentences in luminous prose, this is a faultless piece of writing which has been done justice by an equally faultless piece of translation. Shifting between different times and strands of the story, the narration grips the attention of the reader as if it were someone disclosing confidences quietly to a valued friend.

It is a superb piece of writing which it would be difficult to over-value.

Mrs Sartoris - Model housewife next door?
Mrs Sartoris's confessional chilled me to the bone partly because reading it was a learning experience about the tactful mind of a dutiful housewife, how she exacts her revenge on the world and how she does something macabre to protect someone that precociously doesn't appear to need her. I couldn't have bought the book myself, I found it discarded by my girlfriend (after she'd speedily read it) and I never thought of reading it (I though it was Euro-Chick-Lit) but once I started, I couldn't put it down! A good book for a rainy week.