Rare Earth

Rare Earth

368 pages

Hardcover

Genre: Fiction, Literature, Literary Novel
How do you tell the unknown, the other of the world, the other of your own family history?

When Voyager 1 looks back at Earth many years after its launch from interstellar space, the world has long since become a different place. All that remains for the space probe is its carefully selected cargo of images, music and greetings in 55 languages to tell possible aliens about life on Earth. But the absolutely alien can possibly not only be found in distant galaxies. Also in a South American village Ufos should be as frequent as the stray dogs there. After the death of her grandmother, Therese unceremoniously follows Lenka, an astrophysicist disappointed by science, who is looking for answers to the question of what contact with alien civilizations would mean. But while Therese observes Lenka's longing for another world, she increasingly senses the strangeness in the voids of her own family history: What remains of the hungry winter of 1946/47? What of her grandmother's sister, who threw herself into the half-frozen Main River at night? And how could an honest picture of our planet be drawn at all in a world in which stories can be irretrievably lost within two generations?

German title: Seltene Erde
ISBN: 978-3-7518-0062-4
Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Publication date: 2022

Licence

Novel

Sample translation

English sample available

Eva Raisig, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1984, studied physics and lives as a freelance writer and editor in Berlin. For her literary work, she received, among others, a working scholarship from the Berlin Senate and the Authors' Workshop Prose of the Literary Colloquium Berlin. In 2020, she was an Alfred Döblin Fellow of the Akademie der Künste.