Noland is a love story, but it is also a novel about guilt, memory, roots and boundaries.
Nadja sets out with the sole intention of interviewing Martin Stern, but from the moment she sets eyes on him there is an intimacy between them that is difficult to explain – and a sense of alienation that remains, even when they become
overs. Where does this sense of intimacy come from? And why is the distance between them so difficult to overcome? Nadja embraces this love, even though Martin has difficulties believing in it. Martin, who grew up as a Jew in Frankfurt am Main, left Germany after the German reunification and went to live in Tel Aviv. So much lies between them – biographical experience, geographical distance and a past that relates to things beyond the course of their own lives. The wrong country, the right one, the new one, the holy one – in artful leaps in time, recalling their memories of days spent in Berlin and nights in Tel Aviv, of
ntense closeness and discussions that break down again and again, Jana Hensel sounds the boundaries between two lovers. In powerful and intense language, she explores our understanding of home, history and fate, using her characters to ask the question of how the past dominates our lives.
Jana Hensel, born in Leipzig in 1976, studied Romance studies and modern German literature in Leipzig, Aix-en-Provence, Berlin and Paris. As a student, she published the literary journal Edit and, with Thomas Hettche, the Internet anthology Null. Her book Zonenkinder [Children of the Zone], about the experiences of her generation before and after the fall of the Berlin wall, was a bestseller. Since then she has worked as a journalist, for example as the deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Der Freitag. She won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2010. Keinland [Noland] is her literary debut.
