When Kurt decides to end his life, he persuades his reclusive daughter Martha to drive him to a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland in his exhausted ‘96 VW Golf. Martha, however, is haunted by a traffic accident and inveigles her best friend Betty to chauffeur. And so begins this light-hearted, dark-souled caper across Germany, Italy, and Greece.

The novel opens in Rome. There are rats, machine guns, broken buses, and a stench from the underground. Betty loves it. This ‘desolate diva’ of a city reflects both Betty, the narrator, and Martha. Both women are drifters, fatalistic, lost in the past; living and drinking carelessly, seeing beauty in decay.

Fatalism gives them steel, though, and with death as their watchman, they change the oil in the car and careen through the continent. The miles pass in snappy chat. Compressed together in the car, Kurt, Martha, and Betty exchange pop philosophy and life advice. The dialogue crackles with dark humour and word play. Tempers rise and the car accelerates.

Betty is more than the driver. Her quest, initially interrupted by Martha, is to visit the grave of her stepfather, and lay her grieving ghost to rest. This pilgrimage takes her to Bellegra in Italy and south to the Greek islands. There’s a gun, a break-in, police, sticky ouzo, and a suspicious trail of sunflower seeds. Suddenly, Betty is living in the present.

Subverting the tropes of travel-writing, Lucy Fricke lingers over urban litter and rural grime. There’s a blemish beneath every rainbow: a tacky balloon in the dome of the Pantheon, and the smell of sewage on the sea. The interplay between beauty and decay forms much of the sadness in the book, but also much of the devil-may-care humour.

“I could understand why you’d left here. There were green shutters on faded buildings here, and white plastic chairs in front of the church. Every colour was watered down, peeling off. There was nothing to do here but hang up laundry outside the windows.”

The fireworks are in the final chapter, the longest by far of the book. Here, on the Greek island of Lofkes, beauty is a tonic. The sea only sparkles. Betty’s mind clears, leaving her with the zenful realisation that Greece would be a fine place to die. To Betty’s embarrassment, her past and present selves finally embrace. She might even write again: a crime novel, perhaps. After all, as Betty tells Yannis, “The Germans are mad for crime.”

Though both women wrestle with unexpected truths about their fathers, Daughters at heart is a slim, wise-cracking, tender novel about friendship, and learning to bury the past in order to live in the present.

***

And Betty, if you ever do kill someone back home and disappear, we know exactly where to find you.

***

Daughters is the fourth novel by German author Lucy Fricke. It was published in English in September 2020 as one of the three inaugural titles from new publishing imprint V&Q Books. The original novel, Töchter, won the Bavarian Book Prize 2018.

Translator Sinéad Crowe discusses Daughters and the work of a literary translator here.

“I don’t believe in removing all traces of “foreignness” from a text, nor do I see any problem in readers being aware that they are reading a translation – I mean, they are, so why try to hide that? I don’t believe that translators should be invisible, either, which is one reason why it was so great to work with V&Q Books, as it gives greater prominence to its translators than many other publishers.” - Sinéad Crowe, literary translator

Many thanks to V&Q Books and Lucy Fricke for my advanced reading copy.

Read on! Further literary travels:

• If you’re anticipating life on the run, first consult The Lost Book of Adventure by the Unknown Adventurer, which, incidentally, also has a reference to Hemingway.

• Venture into the wet, mysterious beech woods of Navarra, Spain in Dolores Redondo’s whodunnit The Invisible Guardian

• Hit England’s 630-mile South West Coast Path in Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path