When Julia Franck was awarded the German Book Prize in 2007, she was by no means a newcomer to the literary scene. The author had already published three novels and two collections of short stories before her epic tome Die Mittagsfrau (literally, Lady Midday, the noonday witch, 2007; published in English as The Blind Side of the Heart, 2009) earned her Germany’s most prestigious literary award. In selecting Franck’s novel, the jury members were unanimous in their praise of its “vivid use of language, narrative power and psychological intensity,” calling it “a novel for long conversations.” Franck’s powerful depiction of a woman who, against the backdrop of war-torn Germany, comes to the momentous decision to abandon her seven-year-old son at a railway station certainly provides plenty of material for discussion.