Neben Fremden by Eva Schmidt takes the form of a series of reminiscences by Rosa, told to us as she sits on her balcony in the autumn of the present day. It is all about Rosa’s encounters with people and the influence these encounters have on Rosa and on the people she comes to know. Her reminiscences begin with a scene on that same balcony that occurred a few months after her partner’s death.

We find out more and more about Rosa through the various stages of personal development she goes through as the novel progresses: meeting and getting to know her partner, Fred; the latter’s death; becoming acquainted with her initially nameless downstairs neighbour; becoming a confidante to the neighbour’s teenage daughter; Rosa’s retirement from working at a senior care home; coming to terms with her own family relationships; and taking in an abandoned dog and having to put her own beloved, elderly dog to sleep, to name just a handful of those experiences. The biggest revelation is that Rosa has an estranged son, born when she was a teenage runaway.

By the time this son, now in his fifties, writes unexpectedly after many years of silence, Rosa has come to realise that there is no need to live a solitary life, with a dog as her closest friend, because people do matter to her – and there are people for whom she is now important as well, who were once strangers with untold struggles and personal histories of their own. After years of coping with personal trauma, she arrives at the conclusion summarised in the novel’s closing line: Mein Leben ist auch ein Leben: My life is a life too.

Press quotes:

Eva Schmidt masters the art of the terse, situative emphasis. In a handful of lines she sketches how wide the chasm is between self-awareness and awareness of the outer world - Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 12 September 2025
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/eva-schmidt-neben-fremden-102.html


Eva Schmidt is perhaps the most brilliant underrated author in the German-speaking literature business. She writes concise books of great linguistic precision. Neither her settings nor her protagonists are spectacular, but her gift of observation, empathy and wisdom are distinctive to an unparalleled degree.

Each of her books is a sensation, regardless of its subject, although the author mainly attends to people's crises of life and loneliness. That was the case in her novel “Ein langes Jahr”, published in 2016. Schmidt celebrated her comeback with it after 20 years. It told of a damaged lives on a desolate housing estate in a roundelay of miniatures and was shortlisted for the Deutscher Buchpreis. Neben Fremden is of this tradition. Tentatively, gently tracing her characters’ hurts, Eva Schmidt asks who are we to judge whether or not a life is a fulfilled one. - SWR Bestenliste, 30.12.2025 (94 points)
https://www.swr.de/kultur/literatur/bestenliste-2026-01-02-102.html

Alexandra Cox qualified with a Master's in Translation from German and French in 2001. Her dissertation was on the standard French translation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Born in the UK, she has been living working as a freelance translator in Germany since 2003. She is a member of ITI and the Translators Association at the SoA. Alexandra has translated multiple publications in the area of literary non-fiction, where she specialises in art and culture. These publications include art catalogues and monographs for exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. When it comes to literary fiction, her interest lies in tales about people and (family) relationships, in stories told with empathy.

Eva Schmidt was born in 1952 and lives in Bregenz. She has written radio dramas, short stories and novels, of which Neben Fremden is her fourth. Her second novel, Ein langes Jahr, was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Deutscher Buchpreis.

A humorous and deeply human short story collection that celebrates outsiders, dreamers, and the queer.

The award-winning Slovak writer Barbora Hrínová’s short stories paint an intimate portrait of people searching for happiness in a world that feels increasingly unstable and uncertain. Across the eight stories in this volume, we meet a rich cast of ordinary yet unconventional people trying to find their place in a society that often prefers conformity over authenticity. Taking us to such settings as a bustling cafe, a small village shack, a rental flat, or a psychiatric ward, Hrínová captures the texture of everyday life with piercing accuracy and a fresh, original voice.

Unicorns is a remarkable debut that resonates across generations. With compassion, wit, and an eye for detail, it shows us that weirdness isn’t rare—it’s a universal human experience.

The story Chemistry follows the (mis)adventures of Bonifác, known as Boni, as he looks for a partner. He is frequently rejected – but the women who are interested in him all have something to hide.

BUY THE BOOK: https://seagullbooks.org/products/unicorns

Isabel Stainsby is a translator (literary/commercial) from Czech, Slovak, German and occasionally French into English. She studied languages and linguistics at Cambridge and Bristol, with a year in the Czech city of Olomouc, then tried out various careers before becoming a freelance translator. She has translated twelve books so far, plus a number of chapters, short stories and articles. Languages are her passion; she also speaks reasonable Russian, a bit of Scottish Gaelic, and is currently learning Hungarian. Translation is her vocation. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband.

Barbora Hrínová studied at the Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, where she now teaches in the Screenwriting Department. She has conducted postdoctoral research on contemporary film at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and spent time at a university in California. A three-time finalist for the Poviedka short-story award, Hrínová also produces radio documentaries for Slovak and Czech national broadcasting. Unicorns is her debut short-story collection, marking a powerful entrance for a fresh and original voice in European literature. Unicorns won the Anasoft Litera, Slovakia's most prestigious literary prize, in 2021, and her novel Plachý dom (The Shy House), published to great acclaim in 2025, has been nominated for the Anasoft Litera 2026.

Three generations of women: Téta, the grandmother, Fadwa, the mother, and Emné, the daughter who captures the tenderness of her fore-bearers. The poems in this collection recall and restore a family lineage broken by war, death and exile.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.the87press.co.uk/shop/p/the-dance-of-the-fig-tree-emne-nasereddine

Stuart Bell is a writer, editor, and translator of French literature. His publications include the edited volumes ‘French Cinema: Stardom, Gender and Popular Film’ (2026), ‘On Feminist Films’ (2024) and ‘Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience’ (2021), as well as translations of several contemporary novels and poetry collections. He has twice been Translator in Residence at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and in 2022 was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his rendition of Édith Azam’s ‘Bird me’.

Emné Nasereddine was born in France in 1990 and grew up in Lebanon where she studied French literature at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Her poetry explores her experiences of immigration, loss and mourning, the lives of Lebanese women, and the customs and traditions of southern Lebanon. The Dance of the Fig Tree is her first book and won the 2021 Émile Nelligan Prize. She lives in Montreal.