A compact, strange little Peirene novella about not knowing the person who sleeps beside you.

After the death of his wife, a man is left to confront not only grief, but the unstable record of their life together: notes, memories, suspicions, contradictions, and the possibility that the marriage he believed he understood was only one version of what had happened.

The tone looks light from a distance, but it keeps circling heavy questions — what we invent about each other, what remains private inside a shared life, and whether love is ever free from projection. Good for readers of European novellas, Jenny Erpenbeck, Max Frisch, Peter Stamm, and fiction that treats marriage less as romance than as an archive with missing pages.

Peirene Press paperback. Written by Matthias Politycki; translated from German. Good second-hand condition from photos, with light handling and shelfwear to cover.