I had found that book years ago within the little library of a friend's holiday home, her mother had left it there together with other novels to discover during endless summer afternoons. I remember the disturbingly impressive descriptions of New York´s black community, how we discussed the circumstances of raising a child as a poor single mother back then.

Now a brilliant new translation into German by Uda Strätling made me read it again - and I have to say: It is as modern and as relevant as it was back then, even more astonishing: The book had been the first bestselling novel of an Afro-American female writer in the mid forties, more than thirty years before I first laid eyes on it.

The simple but precisely chosen words, the story of this young woman and her struggle to survive, even the sad ending allows the reader to make up her or his own mind, because no decision, no character is ever based on qualities like guilt or moral.

In her epilogue of the book, Barack Obama´s favourite writer Tayari Jones speaks of a story, that is "dark but never depressing, destroying but captivating at the same time".

I read it in just three nights.

I had found that book years ago within the little library of a friend's holiday home (...)