Shuttered Life

When her uncle suffers a heart attack, young Berlin photographer Elisa Westphal returns to her family home in Düsseldorf for the first time in many years. Relations have been strained ever since her father’s death, and Elisa finds the reunion desperately uncomfortable. It’s all made worse by the clash between her liberal big-city ways and the rigid formality of life at the family manor. It seems that everyone in town is behaving oddly, even her childhood crush. Is it simply old tensions reemerging, or is something more sinister at play? When Elisa begins receiving menacing notes, she sets to work narrowing down the suspects. As the dangerous incidents pile up, it seems to Elisa that someone is trying to chase her away. But why?

Much like the protagonist of her novel, Florentine Roth loves photography and lives in the beautiful Rhenish metropolis of Düsseldorf. Shuttered Life is her debut novel.