Reading by Sharon Dodua Otoo

"That's roughly how it happened" - a literary chamber piece with a deadly outcome

It is 3 May 2025: Amata Haller and her boss Heinz Brockhaus are driving together to the Baltic Sea. Amata wants to commemorate her grandfather there with her mother - he barely survived the sinking of the Cap Arcona 80 years earlier. But the conversation in the car opens up ever deeper rifts between the characters, and in how they each see the world. In a dramatic turn, the narrator Amata confesses to having killed her boss. Sharon Dodua Otoo builds this extraordinary tension with linguistic precision in a compact form.

Sharon Dodua Otoo is a writer and editor of the English-language book series "Witnessed". She won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016, and her novel "Adas Raum" has been translated into several languages. "That's roughly how it happened" (S. Fischer) is her second novel.