The New Job and The Owl

IN ‘THE NEW JOB’, a naive and hopeful young girl crosses the border into German-speaking Switzerland for a job as an au-pair in a family that may be more sinister than it at first seems. IN ‘THE OWL’, an elderly lady rummages through her memory to work out what made her daughter so painfully distant. These stories, selected from Anna Ruchat’s Swiss Literature Prize-winning collection Gli anni di Nettuno sulla terra (Neptune’s Years on Earth), detail seemingly ordinary episodes in the lives of her characters and through them fascinatingly unravel decades of complex feelings and relationships. They float lightly upon the ebbs and flows of female relationships and leave the reader pondering what-could-have-beens versus what, inevitably, was.