Anne de Marcken

The heroine is – in the afterlife. She lives in the hotel of the undead and has one arm too few, but one crow too many. She can’t remember her name or her childhood. Since the “great catastrophe”, she has found herself in the realm of the nameless and history-less – and yet: she is not resigned! On the contrary. Because she has one precious memory left: The memory of a person. With her… in the dunes… So she sets off for the sea with Crow and without an arm, in search of who she actually is. And in search of what she “used to” know as connection and love.

It lasts forever and then it’s over is a novel that takes the reader into a world that is not so dissimilar to today: a world without certainties, in which even the view of one’s own self and one’s own memories becomes questionable. But in which the question of what defines us at our core can be answered in a hair-raisingly plausible way.

Anne de Marcken is a writer, artist and publisher of the small, innovative publishing house The 3rd Thing. Her second book, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Overwon the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, a $25,000 prize awarded annually to a single work of imaginative fiction. She lives on the untouched land of the Coast Salish in Olympia, Washington.

Translated from the English by Clemens J. Setz

Language: English